Thirty Years of GPS: How It Remade the Efficiency of Every Industry — and Shifted the Balance Between People and Machines | QDaily Business History

A world without GPS is hard to imagine today.

On a Sunday in March 2009, a 43-year-old British man named Robert Jones visited some friends and then drove his BMW home.

Jones followed his navigation system onto a rutted, unpaved country lane that looked entirely unfit for driving. He kept going anyway — all the way to the edge of a cliff thirty metres deep — and only stopped when there was no reversing back. Police spent nine hours winching the car to safety.

Jones was hauled into court, fined £2,000, and given six points on his licence. The charge: failing to pay due care and attention while driving. The judge held that any driver using his brain would never have steered onto such a narrow, precipitous track. As a local farmer put it, even a horse would struggle on that path.

Jones was a professional driver who worked at a car dealership and had a clean record. He argued that his TomTom unit had given him the instructions, and that a driver has no reason to second-guess GPS. The judge was unmoved. Jones's reputation as the man who "switched on his GPS and switched off his brain" made him a tabloid sensation, covered everywhere from the BBC to the gossip press.

In much the same way, in 2012, three Japanese tourists on holiday in Australia followed their sat-nav and drove their car into the sea.

A recent study offers a scientific explanation for this kind of mistake. Neuroscientist Amir-Homayoun Javadi at the University of Kent found that when people find their own way without GPS, the hippocampus — the brain region used for memory and planning — fires busily. But when they drive by following a GPS unit's turn-by-turn prompts, that region stays entirely dark; the ability to judge the road for oneself disappears.

Most of us never have an experience as strange as Jones's, but plenty of us have ignored a road sign because the navigation said so.

A technology that has directly changed how hundreds of millions of brains work has been around for only thirty years.

On 14 February 1989, a Delta II rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Base, carrying the US Air Force's second-generation navigation satellite — designated USA-35 — into Earth orbit. Also known as GPS II-1, it was the first of the twenty-four satellites that make up the GPS global positioning system.

Over the thirty years that followed, GPS has transformed how human society runs. It became indispensable for getting around, and once smartphones spread, it gave birth to whole industries. No other space technology has had anything close to its reach.

The extreme convenience it offers has bred an extreme dependence, and that dependence has changed the relationship between people and machines in several industries — to the point where you can no longer quite tell who is the brain and who is the tool.

Thirty years of GPS, and efficiency has climbed in every sector

GPS's most direct effect on daily life is maps and navigation.

A professional driver's work now rests almost entirely on GPS. In a big city today, even the cabbie who knows the streets best tends to rely on GPS to find a destination and the best route — after all, not every passenger is heading to a landmark.

Uber and Didi go further. They gather three pieces of information: where the passenger is, where the driver is, and where the destination is. From those three positions plus some additional data, the ride-hailing service hands the driver to the right rider. Pooling was added later, automatically bundling passengers whose routes overlap. None of it would be possible if passengers' and drivers' phones could not supply GPS coordinates at any moment.

The same location-based sorting and dispatch shows up in almost every transport-related industry. Meituan and Ele.me route delivery orders using the positions of riders, restaurants, and customers; Lalamove dispatches trucks based on the locations of vehicle, customer, and destination; SF Express and YTO trucks feed live parcel updates back to you. Even aircraft in flight, cargo ships docking in port, and container tracking all depend on GPS for a constant position fix.

In 2018, between 24 and 43 percent of the US population used ride-hailing apps such as Uber and Lyft — a user base of 78 million to 140 million people. In China, ride-hailing reached a penetration rate of 16.9 percent, with Didi and its peers serving 185 million users in all.

From 2011 to 2018, China's food-delivery industry grew 8.4-fold, to more than 364 million users. Daily orders approached 30 million, and on any given day at least one consumer in ten ordered in. Over the previous three years, order frequency had tripled.

On 23 June 2018, Uber announced that its drivers had completed 10 billion trips. Its main rival hit 500 million trips the same year. By one estimate, Uber had more than 2 million drivers and Lyft around 1.4 million; Ele.me's Hummingbird fleet had 3 million riders, and Meituan's food-delivery arm had 2.7 million.

Beyond finding a route and hailing a ride, plenty of apps with no visible map are still built on GPS. Picture a single day: a person opens Dianping to find a nearby restaurant; after eating, opens Meituan to find the nearest cinema; jogs home after the film and logs the route on Keep; gets hungry again and orders through Ele.me; then lies in bed watching same-city clips on Douyin, swipes through profiles on Tantan, chats for a while, and falls asleep. Not one activity in that day works without GPS.

In the third quarter of 2018, the combined daily active users of Meituan and Dianping stood at around 250 million; Meituan's food-delivery business had about 5 million daily active users, and Ele.me about 3 million. Keep had around 2 million, while Douyin announced that its daily active users had passed 250 million.

Among the top ten free apps in the China App Store, six need access to the user's GPS location to work; in the US store, five do.

Nothing escapes GPS. Zoologists have fitted trackers to sheep in Northumberland and built a theory about each animal's urge to reach the centre of the flock; the Royal Veterinary College did the same with pet cats, showing owners just how much their cats forage. Parents who fear their children might wander off can buy a tracking watch or wristband for very little; farmers who fear losing their cattle or sheep can spend three or four hundred yuan on Taobao for a "cattle-herding miracle device."

Manchester City and Liverpool use GPS to train their footballers, tracking their sprint speeds and their distance from teammates; golf balls with tiny embedded GPS chips have freed enthusiasts from the misery of combing a hillside for a lost ball.

From three military numbers to a basic service in every phone: thirty-four years

In 1930, the carmaker Iter Avto designed an "in-built map" car for drivers who could not remember roads, giving a car a "navigation function" for the first time. In practice it merely wound a set of paper maps around a spindle. The car's display scrolled the map at a rate matched to your driving speed, advancing one length of map for each length of road covered.

The flaws were obvious. The car's paper maps were limited — they covered only a few city centres and could not be updated once bought. And the moment you left the planned route, you had to adjust the map by hand and find your exact position.

That was how people fixed a car's location before GPS.

But what drove the US military to spend billions developing GPS was not driving — it was precise nuclear strikes.

A nuclear submarine, for instance, needed an exact fix on its own position to ensure its missiles could fly precisely onto their targets and destroy Soviet nuclear missiles sheltered behind reinforced-concrete bunkers. At the same time, the submarine had to keep evading enemy search, which meant completing a fix as fast as possible. That called for a method both fast and accurate, one that covered every corner of the globe — a nuclear submarine could surface anywhere.

Making a nuclear arsenal worth hundreds of billions of dollars more lethal: that was the case the Pentagon made when it sought GPS funding.

In 1973, Brad Parkinson — an Air Force officer with a doctorate from Stanford and a master's from MIT — presented his idea to senior commanders at the Pentagon. He described a constellation of satellites, a global ground-control system, nine kinds of user receiver, and a wide programme of land, sea, and air testing.

Parkinson came away with approval and funding for only four satellites. Soon afterward he was appointed launch commander for the first GPS satellite.

The principle behind GPS positioning is fairly simple. A satellite broadcasts a carrier signal carrying ranging codes to ground receivers; the satellite's orbit is known (x, y, z), so a ground receiver, by analysing the signal it picks up at a given moment, can work out the distance from satellite to receiver. As few as three satellites are enough to fix a user's position on Earth and their altitude; the more satellite signals the receiver picks up, the more precise the fix it decodes.

In the end the project became a vast system of twenty-seven satellites. But before the last one went up in 1995, the Soviet Union had already collapsed. The US government had also authorised private companies, ahead of time, to develop civilian GPS receivers.

In 1983, Korean Air Lines Flight 007 strayed into Soviet airspace and was shot down. President Reagan announced that once GPS was built, all civilian aircraft would be allowed to use it, to improve navigation and air safety.

Even as it opened civilian service, the United States feared that hostile states might use GPS to attack it, so it added error into the civilian signal — the Selective Availability (SA) policy — to lower its accuracy, leaving civilian positioning accurate to only about 100 metres while US military signals stayed accurate to within 10 metres. That error policy was not dropped until after 2000, during Bill Clinton's presidency.

Even with the deliberate error, civilian GPS was already the most advanced invention every waiting industry could have hoped for.

In 1990, the Japanese carmaker Mazda used the still-unfinished American GPS network to launch the world's first GPS-navigated car. For the first time, a driver on the road could fix his own position using satellites in space. The fruits of the "Space Age" had finally reached the automobile.

In the late 1990s, a new policy pushed GPS into mobile phones.

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Congress passed the E-911 law. Under it, when you dial 911 for help, the police officer, firefighter, or paramedic on the other end can use information from the phone company to obtain the caller's geographic coordinates — so that, in an emergency, a rescue is not delayed because the caller cannot describe where they are.

This sped GPS's path into handsets. Landlines could already be located through the phone company, but mobile phones could not. So after E-911, the industry association began pushing hard to put GPS into phones.

The very year E-911 was introduced, the first GPS phone was born. Handset maker Benefon launched the first commercial GPS phone, called the Benefon Esc!.

The general public's first impression of GPS was three numbers: longitude, latitude, and altitude. For most people those numbers stayed abstract, and they meant something only alongside a map.

Today, though you use GPS almost every day, you are usually unaware of it. Hailing a ride, choosing a restaurant, ordering delivery, meeting the people "nearby" — you look at no map and no numbers. Positioning has merged with the internet and dissolved into vast algorithms.

Behind this lie several major advances in how GPS is used.

In 2004, Qualcomm developed and tested "Assisted GPS," which lets a phone combine cellular signals with GPS signals to place the user within a few feet of their actual position. That advance greatly improved how smartphones use GPS.

Today, when something blocks the GPS signal from a device's GPS chip — most often indoors — the device estimates distance by talking to cellular base stations. Wi-Fi adds another layer: a Wi-Fi network's location can be matched to GPS coordinates, so when a user is on Wi-Fi, their position can be pinned to a specific shopfront. The technique reshaped advertising, letting bricks-and-mortar shops market themselves far more precisely.

As early as 2010, the Singapore firm YFind was tracking the movements of every Wi-Fi-enabled user inside shopping malls for precision marketing. Google built a similar feature into Android — Scanning Always Available — also using Wi-Fi signals to fix a user's location.

Today, when you open Didi, Dianping, Ele.me, Tinder, or 58.com, you see not a map but a straight list of results.

Behind it, Didi matches your position against the driver's and the destination's, then picks a suitably close driver; Dianping matches your position against restaurant locations and picks the right ones; Ele.me matches people and restaurants by location and then loops in an Ele.me rider; the instant you open Tinder to meet a stranger, it matches your location against those of the opposite sex in your city. Every service tied to daily life runs on GPS.

In practice, of course, the order of items in a list is not set purely by distance from your GPS coordinates — the real algorithms are far more complex — but for many apps, location matching is the most basic first step.

GPS's usefulness has come loose from maps themselves and melted deep into every industry.

When we speak of GPS today, we no longer mean only that one American satellite system. Over twenty years, Russia, China, and the European Union have each built their own satellite navigation systems, and the word "GPS" is being supplanted by GNSS — Global Navigation Satellite System. GNSS spans the American GPS, Russia's GLONASS, China's BeiDou, and the EU's Galileo; the number of satellites available worldwide has now passed 100.

Building a satellite system takes enormous labour and resources. It is not that, because the US military had the technology, every great power was eager to build its own. But GPS is so important, and a world without it so hard to imagine, that even the EU — which overlaps heavily with NATO — launched Galileo over US objections.

GPS Development Timeline

1957

MIT scientists propose judging position by measuring the distance between a satellite and the ground.

1963

A US aerospace company pitches the GPS concept to the US military for the first time.

1974

The US military launches a NAVSTAR test navigation satellite, the forerunner of GPS.

1982

Russia's GLONASS global navigation satellite system launches its first satellite.

1983

Soviet forces shoot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 after it strays into their airspace. President Reagan announces that once GPS is built, it will be made available to all civilian aircraft.

1985

The US government signs contracts with private companies, authorising them to develop "airborne, shipborne, and manportable" GPS receivers.

1989

On 14 February, after years of testing, the US Air Force finally launches the first fully operational GPS satellite. The Air Force had planned to launch the satellite from the Space Shuttle, but after the Challenger disaster of 1986 switched to Delta II rockets.

1989

Magellan Corporation begins selling the first handheld navigation device in the US, the Magellan NAV 1000.

1990

The US Department of Defense degrades GPS civilian accuracy to keep adversaries from using it.

1993

GPS officially enters full operation; months later, President Bill Clinton declares that the world can keep using it free of charge "for the foreseeable future."

1995

The final GPS satellite launch is completed, putting all twenty-seven fully operational GPS satellites in orbit. Russia's GLONASS system also reaches near-complete satellite coverage.

1999

Handset maker Benefon launches the first commercial GPS phone, the Benefon Esc!.

2000

The US Department of Defense stops degrading civilian GPS accuracy. China launches two geostationary satellites for its BeiDou Navigation Satellite Experimental System.

2001

TomTom and Garmin begin releasing personal GPS products — in-car navigation devices.

2004

Qualcomm develops and tests "AGPS" technology, speeding up GPS positioning on phones. China breaks ground on the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BeiDou-2).

2007

The first iPhone launches, carrying a mobile version of Google Maps.

2008

Apple's App Store goes live, letting internet apps call on GPS data to deliver services. The same year, Google Maps brings free turn-by-turn navigation to both Android and iOS, making navigation a free service for every phone user.

2010

The Uber app launches; the concept of ride-hailing is born, driving reform across a range of industries.

2011

The EU's Galileo positioning system launches its first operational satellite.

2012

China's BeiDou Navigation Satellite System completes coverage of most of the Asia-Pacific and begins providing official satellite navigation services.

2016

The EU's Galileo positioning system holds an activation ceremony in Brussels and begins providing early services.

The automation GPS enables has brought boundless convenience — but it has also changed the relationship between people and machines

In 1978, The New York Times reported that New York City's taxi drivers had grown so inexperienced that some could no longer tell north from south even in the grid-straight streets of Manhattan.

New York had only 11,800 taxis then, worked in shifts by 36,000 drivers. But cab companies could no longer hire enough qualified drivers — a New York cabbie had once been expected to know the famous landmarks and roads by heart and to point out every precinct's exact spot on a map. In the end the companies had to lower the bar and take on people who had neither experience nor any feel for the city. As the Times put it, all you needed was to speak English.

Today New York's traditional yellow cabs still number only about 13,500, and some of their drivers can barely make themselves understood in English. Yet the ride is actually better. As long as the driver knows the destination, the GPS unit guides him to deliver the passenger there.

New York also has nearly 80,000 Uber and Lyft vehicles, most of their drivers just as inexperienced — yet they too work under GPS guidance.

With GPS and ride-hailing apps, the driver's job has never been simpler.

Driving a taxi used to be no easy job. First, the driver had to watch the street on every side for someone hailing a cab and judge when and where the most riders would be.

With a passenger aboard, the driver had to recall the roads and work out how to reach the destination by the shortest, least congested (or most profitable) route. If he had not heard of the passenger's destination, he also had to consult a map.

In the end a skilled driver brought more value, and so earned more in return.

Today software and algorithms have solved all of this. The software dispatches orders from passenger and driver positions; it decides the route from congestion data; getting lost is harder than ever.

The upside is that a qualified driver is now easy to find. The data-analytics site Statista shows that from 1990, when GPS formally entered the auto industry, the number of licensed drivers in the United States began to surge and has never stopped.

But as the University of Kent's neuroscience research found, through all this the hippocampus in a driver's brain is not activated; his ability to judge city streets and traffic does not improve; he grows no more familiar with the roads or the city. You could say the whole business of moving people is the product of a computer algorithm's "intelligence," and that the supposedly smarter human is still at the wheel only because machines are not yet reliable enough to handle complex traffic alone.

Inside the Didi and Uber system, the machine algorithm is the thinker, and the human is more like an execution tool.

That is also why, once the subsidy wars ended, driving for them became, for most, a low-income job with no room to rise.

The same plays out in food delivery, courier services, and other sectors: the automated network of algorithms, smartphones, and GPS has hugely raised the efficiency of society as a whole, yet the value of the people doing this work has been squeezed.

The better-paid aviation industry is no different at heart. In GPS's tenth year, Air France Flight 447's autopilot briefly failed when its pitot tubes iced over. No severe weather, no intractable mechanical fault — two fully trained pilots flew more than 200 passengers and crew into the ocean.

The reason: aviation had become so automated that on a flight of more than ten hours, the pilots actually controlled the aircraft for only a few dozen minutes.

Arnold Reiner, a captain since the 1980s, says his job has shifted from pilot to systems administrator: "We fly the airplane with the keyboard. Jokingly in training, pilots say that to pass the check ride, they need to type fifty words a minute. GPS has become accurate to within feet, and pilots need to make only a few inputs following its commands."

Yet after the Air France tragedy, aviation's answer was not to give people more control but to make automation more complete, and to train pilots to fit the autopilot system rather than take it over entirely.

By the results, this was not the wrong call. At the turn of the millennium, one fatal crash occurred for every 594,800 flights; in the past five years the rate has improved to nearly one fatal crash per 3 million flights. The reasons include better aircraft manufacturing, but they are inseparable from the spread of GPS.

Take the human out as an uncertain variable, and aviation has become safer than ever. The machine has proved its superiority; its voice carries more and more weight in our lives, and the judgment of the human brain seems that much less important.

In 1909 — eighty years before GPS existed — the celebrated British author E. M. Forster wrote his only science-fiction work, The Machine Stops. It describes a society that worships the machine, depends on it utterly, and runs by its instructions. The instant the machine breaks down and stops turning, that society falls into chaos and death.

Forster was warning about the reality of the Industrial Revolution, in which human life was organised around the machine. In the end, factories of the industrial age did revolve around machines — but doing so freed more people from the factory floor and brought society more vitality.

Today the automated system of internet-company algorithms, GPS, and smartphones has likewise reduced the value of human labour — yet people have not found new things to create, and more and more have become an extension of the system's will.

In 2014, Professor Brad Parkinson, one of GPS's inventors, told an interviewer that he still prefers to pull out a paper map to find his way: "Most people don't look at maps anymore. They just rely on GPS to tell them where to go."

But whether Parkinson likes it or not, what he made has changed human habits for good — and changed the relationship between people and machines forever.

Cover image / Visualhunt