50 Reasons to be Happy- GPS Navigation

Reason #49- GPS Navigation

It’s 1970 and you are driving across the country to visit family several states away. Every couple of hours, you stop in at a filling station (which is what they used to call gas stations) and pull out a folded paper map and slowly unfold it on your lap. When the map exceeds the space there, you get out and open it up on the hood of the car. After several minutes of studying the map, you locate approximately where you are on the highway and decide the best route for the next couple of hours. It takes three tries and 10 minutes to fold the map, probably not the way it came, and you climb back in your car and continue the drive, hoping that you remember the turns ahead. A couple of hours later, you repeat the process, since the last thing you want is to be lost in a section of the country in which you’ve never been before.

Once you get to your destination city, your stop in a filling station there includes getting a local street map. Again, you unfold and study it on your hood, this time looking the street name up in the street list on the back and searching for the pertinent coordinates on the map that was listed. When you can’t find it on the map, you ask the gas attendant for help and he cheerfully, or not so cheerfully, gives you directions to the address of your Aunt Martha’s house, but too fast to write them down. After making three wrong turns, you miraculously find a street that had been mentioned by the attendant and you finally arrive.

That was life before GPS navigation. I grew up working for my dad in his filling station and one of my jobs was to supply maps and directions to lost or frustrated motorists. Compare that process to our present one, in which we pull up the navigation app or GPS device on the dashboard, enter the address, wait a minute, and the first direction is read to you by a lovely disembodied voice. Yes, we have many reasons to be happy about GPS navigation.

The U.S. began the use of satellites in global positioning of submarines in the ‘60s, utilizing radio signals from six satellites orbiting the poles and the “Doppler effect” of shifting of signals to locate the nuclear-weapon-bearing subs in a matter of minutes. In the ‘70s, the U.S. Department of Defense developed a more robust navigation system using 24, then 33, satellites (NAVSTAR).

Today, free GPS is available continuously to the U.S. and other governments and military, contractors of the military, corporations and the public, with accuracy predicated on the level of service.

Both geolocation and time information are utilized by cell phones, GPS devices and locater tags worldwide. In 2000, public GPS receivers had about a 16-foot accuracy range, but, in 2018, a much more accurate location service was allowed, now within about 11 inches. Besides navigation, there are other important uses of global positioning systems, such as locating or tracking your or your family while in the field, hiking, exploring, etc. This can be especially important in an emergency, even in your vehicle. Installing a tracking device in your car will allow you to track it if it is stolen. There are even GPS tracking devices you can put on your pets’ collars. Many businesses with fleets of trucks use GPS tracking to manage the trucks and their progress.

Another interesting fact about GPS navigation is that it proved Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. According to phys.org, “As predicted by Einstein’s theory, clocks under the force of gravity run at a slower rate than clocks viewed from a distant region experiencing weaker gravity. This means that clocks on Earth observed from orbiting satellites run at a slower rate. To have the high precision needed for GPS, this effect needs to be taken into account or there will be small differences in time that would add up quickly, calculating inaccurate positions.” Thank you, Mr. Einstein. We continue to be in your debt.

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To complete this discussion, I’ll quote American comedian Judy Gold, who said, “I have decided now that my mother should be the GPS woman, don’t you think? That would be fantastic: ‘Make a left in 11 miles. Get over now – I want you to be prepared. Turn right on Elm Street, I want to see if Myrna Rosenblatt is still alive. Make your second left by the Dairy Queen. Don’t go in, they’re anti-Semitic.’”

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The Life and Times of Jack Huber