The National Inventors Hall of Fame holds names like Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell (and Steve Jobs with Steve Wozniak for inventing the personal computer) and now a pioneer of satellite telemetry and father of GPS, Roger L. Easton, has joined the list of word-famous inventors thanks to his TIMATION invention, a crucial system for GPS navigation. His invention helped for the NAVSTAR-Global Positioning System to be developed so that we can nowadays have GPS technology even in our shoes. Impressive. The patent number is 3,789,409, just in case you would like to look it up for yourselves.

The NIHF Medal of Honor was awarded to the inventor during a ceremony held at the Department of Commerce Herbert C. Hoover Auditorium in Washington, by David Kappos.

“Roger’s career contributions and his keen ability to develop new, bigger ‘problem sets’ from his experiences are what impressed me most,” said long time colleague and current Director of NRL’s Naval Center for Space Technology, Pete Wilhelm. “His leap in vision led to the United States’ first satellite tracking network and patent of synchronized timing of spacecraft which became the fundamental basis for GPS.”

Roger L. Easton has worked on projects like the Vanguard-1 satellite launched in orbit in the late ’50’s. The inventor and his colleagues built the tracking system for this satellite, which was the world's first system of this kind. The tracking technology he helped invent for the Vanguard-1 was called the MINITRACK. He further extended this technology during the Cold War, in collaboration with DARPA and NAVASPUR, in order to build the first system that could track all types of objects orbiting the Earth, including the Russian's recently launched, at that time, Sputnik Satellite.

After this, based on the idea of using satellite-carried precise atomic clocks for passive ranging, Easton exploited space-based systems for geodesy, navigation and timing in order to complete the TIMATION system, which was able to give accurate and timed navigation information. This system is being used even today by GPS satellites.


We are just a few, but there are many of you, Softpedia users, out there. That's why we thought it would be a good idea to create an email address for you to help us a little in finding gadgets we missed. Interesting links are bound to be posted with recognition going mainly to those who submit. The address is .