Gps History

When you think of modern inventions and how much they have impacted our society, I bet you don’t consider the compass or gunpowder to be two of the most influential inventions. Considering the compass and how big of an influence it was and then having it turn into modern day GPS. Then switch over to gunpowder, do I even need to mention how much that has changed our society. In both positive and negative ways on how far guns have come. In this paper I will discuss the compass history good and bad along with how it has turned into a GPS and I will also discuss the history of gunpowder, and what it was intentionally used for.

Before the compass was invented people navigated by the position of the celestial bodies or the Arabs would use the clear

In a book summary I read which is called You Are Here: From Compass to GPS written by Hiawatha Bray he states “the idea of the satellite goes back to 1869, a story called “The Brick Moon” written by U.S. Senate Chaplin Edward Everett Hale.” Fast forward ninety years, with the success of Russia’s Sputnik scientists with the applied physics department at John Hopkins University began working on what we now know as Navy’s Transit Satellite. Going into 1964 the polar orbiting satellite navigation system began functioning, three years later would become open for commercial use. The author of the summary Chip Brown states “The limitations of the Transit satellites — spotty coverage, no super-accurate cesium clocks to measure tiny variations in time caused by distance, and a two-dimensional data stream that provided longitude and latitude but not altitude — influenced the engineers of the Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, Calif., who in 1962 began working Project 621B, a space-based navigation system for the Air Force.” This project was the beginning of the beginning of what eventually became known as GPS. These network satellites made public during the 1991 Persian Gulf War and without all the hard work today, local girls would not be able to find a Caribou Coffee in a different neighborhood so

Using the gunpowder to burn, poison, blind, and create a smokescreen it was taken to the next level when it was used to create flaming arrows and projectile launchers. Not only air explosives but also land, bombs and mines became very common. In the 14th Century gunpowder and projectile technology came to Europe and here it was developed into cannons and used to bring down stone walls during raids. The improvement of field artillery and handguns in the late 15th century meant that knights, who were troubled by armor that did not stop bullets, became vulnerable. As a result, mounted soldiers quickly adapted by traveling unarmored, leading to the development of the modern cavalry