What would you do if you had to live in 1950s America?

[Cutlass]

I thought Apple had a patent on that technique?

There was no Apple in 1950s.


How much do you figure DoD would have paid for a patent on GPS? I couldn't work out the math or electronics, but I think I could describe how it would work well enough to get a patent. Publish something on this shortly after Sputnik, and you should be golden.

 

[History_Buff]

How much do you figure DoD would have paid for a patent on GPS? I couldn't work out the math or electronics, but I think I could describe how it would work well enough to get a patent. Publish something on this shortly after Sputnik, and you should be golden.

Eh, there's no way you'd get a patent on that. The fundamental operation of GPS is just a 4 way resection, and the idea of resections is as old as land surveying. It's also fairly analogous to LORAN, which was used for locating ships and aircraft using on-shore radio broadcasters. Development on that had started in the 40s. Besides, I'm sure the DoD would just declare that it was critical to national defense and void your patent anyway.

What you probably could patent is the method to get around Selective Availability (the artificial bias the Airforce put in there to foul up civilians but is now disabled) using differential positioning. That's some extremely valuable knowledge right there, but DGPS and RTK are pretty friggin' complicated, you'd have to be an expert in the field now to have any hope of deriving it yourself.