Page 8 - Boca Exposure - January '25

Page 8, Boca Exposure
Book Review

Pinpoint: How GPS Is and Japan more navigational aid, explorers in canoes found tiny oases
accurate. Although
scattered across one-third of the planet, an expanse nearly
Changing Technology, Culture, the facts were kept as vast as Europe and Asia combined.”
• As part of its ongoing attempts to prevent civilians
And Our Minds from civilians at from deriving the full benefits of GPS technology the
home, the truth was
that the Army Air Pentagon in April 1990 established a two-tier coding to
By Nils A. Shapiro Corps’ doctrine of enable the satellite service. The restricted one was labeled
Nils began his career high-altitude bombing SA, which stood for select availability and was reserved
as marketing director for to avoid hazardous for the military. Four months later Iraq invaded Kuwait
a major book publisher. daytime raids resulted in Desert Storm and a private American company, which
He has since edited the in targets often being had developed a highly efficient small received called
authors’ manuscripts for missed by more than a the Trimpack, filled a Pentagon order for 1,000 units
more than 20 published mile. that enabled U.S. forces to know where they were in the
books, written more than And then, for open spaces of the desert, providing one’s latitude and
200 book reviews, served decades, the military longitude, directions to another location and even store the
as publisher of several rejected to the point GPS coordinates of special battle maneuvers. In order to
million-plus circulation of sabotaging at every do so it needed to have Pentagon clearance for SA access.
national magazines, created opportunity the use of GPS for civilian purposes! This is But when that company ran out of their Trimpacks another
the official yearbooks for teams in Major League Baseball, one of the most frustrating themes that runs through much firm, Magellan, offered a substitute of their own that could
the National Football League, National Basketball of the book, a constant example of the shortsightedness provide most of the same benefits. “Despite a price tag of
Association and National Hockey League, and “retired” of the American military in its obsessive concern about $1,000 soldiers wanted these Magellans—even if they had
as president of a successful telecommunications company. technology getting into the hands of an enemy. It was left to pay for them out of their own pockets. Their families
As miraculous as is the now common practice of being to private industry to do the job. called the company, which directed them to marine retail
guided by an invisible voice as you drive miles through Interestingly, one of the individuals who played a role outfits. The most enterprising soldiers would manage to
streets and down highways, making left and right turns in its development was an immigrant who, hating and call Magellan directly from the Gulf and arrange for the
on command until you arrive at your predetermined fearing Ayatollah Khomeini, fled from Iran hoping to company to ship the receivers directly to them.”
destination, the true background story of how this work hard and bring his wife and children to the U.S. He • When the private companies began to develop GPS
technology—the Global Positioning System (GPS)—was was hired in 1981 by a tech firm, Trimble Navigation, was technology their focus was on the mariner (boaters’) market,
created and developed is equally extraordinary, and it is told fascinated by the concept of GPS and was instrumental not automobile drivers. In 1989, Gary Burrell and Min Kao
here in impressive detail thanks to the clearly exhaustive in the introduction three years later of their first GPS started their Garmin Company (named from the first parts
depth of research by author Greg Milner. After 266 pages receiver. of both their names) and soon proved them wrong. “By
of text there are an additional 50 reference pages. • The book’s first two chapters are fascinating in 2006, Garmin controlled 60 percent of the U.S. [market] for
I must state at the outset that so fascinating to me is describing centuries of mankind’s search for an answer navigation equipment. Americans bought five million Garmin
the way that the GPS technology is able to provide its to the question, “Where am I?” On a planet that consists GPS receivers that year, as the company posted $1.68 billion
driving directions to the general public. I was sufficiently more of water than land, with no identifiable markings in sales, a 64 percent increase from 2005. Fully half of the
intrigued to keep turning the pages to the very last one, and a flat surrounding horizon, travelers on the open ocean company’s revenue came from GPS units, with sales in that
even though, because of other important events in GPS’s were forced to reckon by the sun, moon and stars. segment growing at an astounding 140 percent annually.”
history and other ways in which it is used, the author took As the author notes, “In seafaring and navigational U.S. News & World Report Magazine credited Garmin with
many narrative detours that (ironically, considering this terms, while the Europeans were discovering fire, the opening up a new consumer category.
book’s subject matter) it frequently left a “non-techie” Polynesians had already split the atom. They crossed I may have gotten lost a few times learning about GPS
like me lost for a while. the ocean in canoes roughly 60 feet long, built from in these pages because of my low technical IQ, but you
But it has been well worth the trip. And here are just hollowed-out trees, with sails made from woven leaves. shouldn’t let that stop you from heading straight for a
a few of the hundreds of things you will learn here to … And yet, with no compass, sextant, or any other modern copy of this book.
underscore my recommendation that you dip into Pinpoint
… especially if your technology IQ exceeds mine.
• There is a constellation of 31 GPS satellites orbiting
more than 20,000 kilometers above planet Earth. Every
few minutes 16 U.S. Air Force monitoring stations around
the world, from Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific to the
South of England, collect data from satellites coming
over the horizon, noting speed and trajectory based on
1,200 different protocols that tell how the satellite is
performing. There is no room for error. Among other
uses, all the world’s atomic clocks base their timing on
these satellites. And for drivers, if a satellite’s timing is
off by one millionth of a second the directions can send
a driver as far as 200 miles from the desired destination!
• America’s first interest in developing a technology
that would later become GPS began in earnest during
World War II. Its purpose: to kill people more efficiently
by making our airplanes’ bombing raids over Germany
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