Letter to the Editor: Who Invented GPS?

January 1, 2007  - By
Image: GPS World

In your August 2006 issue, you raised the question: Who was first with GPS? And you concluded that a debate may not be useful. You may be right. In spite of Richard Easton’s Internet claim that his father, Roger Easton, invented GPS by filing an enabling U.S. patent number 378 9409 in 1974, he must have had his doubt. For he preceded his article with a quote by Alexander von Humboldt, who had observed that the third stage of scientific discovery “finally credits the wrong person.”

From its very beginning, the invention of GPS was teamwork. First and foremost among them were the rivaling research teams of the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy.

In the 1940s, the navigation system LORAN, still in use by ships today, was developed by an MIT research team while Ivan A. Getting was a researcher at MIT’s Radiation Laboratory. In 1951, Getting became the head of research and engineering at Raytheon Corp. in Waltham, Massachusetts. They developed a mobile ballistic missile guidance system, called MOSAIC. In 1960, Getting was asked by the Air Force to create a nonprofit military systems development organization and became president of Aerospace Corp. While planning new ballistic missile systems, space-launch systems and high powered chemical lasers, he focused on and became an evangelist for Navstar. “GPS was incubated in the mind of Ivan Getting,” noted the National Inventors Hall of Fame when it inducted him and Colonel Bradford Parkinson.

Everybody agreed, however, that many others were part of the several inventor teams and deserve credit as well.

Back in 1991, as president of ACSM, I had the opportunity to speak to Col. Bradford Parkinson’s GPS expert, Col. Gaylord Green. He told me that their small team of six or seven scientists had built the GPS architecture in 1972, in less than a month. Air Force team members included Mel Birnbaum, Bob Rennard, and Jim Spilker. The GPS concept and theory had been established earlier as a Transit system, and has always been an “institutional endeavor,” said Green.

Richard Easton also mentioned James Buisson, Thomas McCaskill, Don Lynch, Charles Bartholomew, Randolph Zirn and “an important outsider,” Robert Kern, as talented team members of his father, Roger, at the Naval Research Lab (NRL). It turns out that the important outsider, Robert Kern, became the founder of Frequency & Time Systems, Inc. (FTS), a manufacturer of atomic clocks for GPS satellites, in Beverly, Massachusetts, in 1971.

He may or may not be a descendant of the famous Swiss instrument manufacturer Kern A.G., which is related to Wild Heerbrugg of Switzerland, now Leica. In its website, Milestones of Technology, it describes that it had conducted the first feasibility study for the GPS program 621B of the U.S. Air Force in 1967. Likewise, in 1971, it defined, designed, and built early prototype receivers for the Navy’s GPS program Timation. As Gaylord Green pointed out, GPS has always been an institutional endeavor.

To sum it up, the diverse teams of GPS inventors and designers were led by at least three outstanding American scientists. They are Ivan A. Getting of Raytheon and Aerospace Corporation, who in the 1950s “incubated GPS in his mind;” Bradford Parkinson of the U.S. Air Force, who helped create GPS in 1972; and Roger Easton, of the U.S. Navy Research Laboratory, who filed the enabling patent in 1974.

Thanks to their joint effort, simultaneously or in succession, we can today look at GPS applications, both military and commercial, where the sky is truly the limit.

– Gunther Greulich, PLS, PE,
Former president ACSM

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