Success Has Many Fathers - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 36

ineligible for the Nobel Prize, which is given only to living people. Similarly, a
vigorous debate persists over the roles various people played in the origin of gps.
Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and a space visionary,
wrote in 1945 about communications satellites in geosynchronous orbits. He
anticipated a gps-type system in a 1956 letter:
My general conclusions are that perhaps in 30 years the orbital relay system
may take over all the functions of existing surface networks and provide
others quite impossible today. For example, the three stations in the 24-hour
orbit could provide not only an interference and censorship-free global tv
service for the same power as a single modern transmitter, but could also
make possible a position-inding grid whereby anyone on earth could locate
himself by means of a couple of dials on an instrument about the size of a
watch. (A development of Decca and transistorisation.) It might even make
possible world-wide person- to-person radio with automatic dialling. Thus
no-one on the planet need ever get lost or become out of touch with the
community, unless he wanted to be. 1
Early Satellite Navigation Proposals
The following list shows eight American pre-gps satellite navigation proposals.
U.S. Pre-gps Space-Based Navigation Proposals
Angle
Edward Everett Hale, “The Brick Moon,” 1870
Doppler
Lovell Lawrence Jr., “Navigation by Satellites,” Missiles and Rockets , 1956
Transit, George Weiffenbach and William Guier, Applied Physics Labo-
ratory, 1958
Range Measurement
Don Williams, Hughes Aircraft, 1959
secor (sequential correlation of range), Army, 1961
Roy Anderson, ge/nasa, 1963
Timation (time navigation), Roger Easton, Naval Research Laboratory, 1964
621b, Air Force/Aerospace Corporation, 1964
The list begins with one far predating the space age. Edward Everett Hale,
more famous for his story “A Man without a Country,” published “The Brick
Moon” serially in the Atlantic Monthly in 1869. Hale proposed using satellites