EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE until 14:00 (GMT) on Tuesday 12 February 2019

Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering awarded to the

creators of the Global Positioning System (GPS)

London, 12 February 2019: The 2019 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (QEPrize) is awarded to four responsible for creating the first truly global, -based positioning system – GPS. The QEPrize is the world’s most prestigious engineering accolade, a £1 million prize that celebrates the global impact of engineering innovation on humanity.

The 2019 winners are Dr Bradford Parkinson, Professor James Spilker, Jr, Hugo Fruehauf, and

Richard Schwartz – announced today by Lord Browne of Madingley, Chairman of the Queen

Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation, in the presence of HRH The Princess Royal in

London.

The global positioning system represents a pioneering innovation which, for the first time, enabled free, immediate access to accurate position and timing information around the world.

Today, an estimated four billion people around the world use GPS, and its applications range from navigation and disaster relief through to climate monitoring systems, banking systems, and the foundation of tomorrow’s transport, agriculture, and industry.

GPS uses a constellation of at least 24 orbiting , ground stations, and receiving devices.

Each satellite broadcasts a radio signal containing its location and the time from an extremely accurate onboard atomic clock. GPS receivers need signals from at least four satellites to determine their position; they measure the time delay in each signal to calculate the distance to each satellite, then use that information to pinpoint the receiver’s location on earth.

The basic tracking required for GPS dates back to the start of the space race, when radio operators tracked Sputnik I on its groundbreaking flight in 1957. Sputnik’s radio signals appeared to drop in frequency as it passed overhead, a phenomenon known as the Doppler shift that allowed the satellite’s position to be determined.

GPS has had a revolutionary impact upon modern society. At just $2 per receiver, GPS provides an accessible service and a powerful tool that people can integrate with their own applications.

Simple smartphone apps can track disease outbreaks, self-driving tractors can optimise crop harvests, and sports teams can improve team performance. New applications for GPS continually appear, and its annual economic value has been estimated to be $80 billion for the USA alone.

The chief architect, Bradford Parkinson, is often called the ‘father of GPS’ after successfully building upon several separate systems to create the current GPS design. Parkinson directed the program and led the development, design, and testing of its key components. He insisted that

GPS needed to be intuitive and inexpensive, which later made navigation accessible to billions.

To realise the project, Parkinson recruited James Spilker to design the signal that the satellites broadcast. This type of ranging signal is critical to the success of GPS for civilian use; it is resistant to jamming, precise, and allows multiple satellites to broadcast on the same frequency without interfering with each other. Spilker’s team also developed and built the first receiver to process the GPS satellite signals; his delay-locked loop process, used for tracking code division multiple access (CDMA) signals, is essential to GPS accuracy.

GPS receivers rely on accurate timing information, broadcasted from satellites, to determine their position on earth. Each satellite uses multiple atomic clocks – accurate to within billions of a second – to ensure consistent timing. Hugo Freuhauf, then Chief at Rockwell

Industries, led the development of a miniaturised, radiation-hardened atomic clock – the heart of the GPS satellite. Its accuracy is the backbone of communications systems, power grids, financial networks, and other critical infrastructure.

For the GPS program to be affordable, each satellite had to be long-lived. Richard Schwartz, the

Program Manager at Rockwell during the development of these satellites, was tasked with ensuring a three-year life span. His design was resistant to the intense radiation from the upper

Van Allen belt, and it also lasted over nine years.

When asked whether the winners knew that GPS could change the world, Dr Bradford

Parkinson said: “One of the most important things we had when the project started was a vision of world impact. Without that inspiration, it would have been difficult for us to weather the storms of doing something for the first time. Back in 1978, I made a few drawings that depicted GPS applications that I could personally foresee; they included an automobile navigation system, semi- automatic air traffic control, and wide-area vehicle monitoring, and seem to be rather accurate 41 years later. That said, none of us could fathom the sheer breadth of GPS applications – the many ways that it would become a “System for Humanity”.

When asked about the origins of GPS Professor James Spilker said: “In 1973 we began the design of GPS seriously and made the decision that it would become a majority civil technology application. This would depend on making the receivers cheaper. To meet that objective we had to overcome the constraints of large Doppler shifts in the system, which prevented us using relatively simple linear algebra. We used computers to select the signal and the optimal

GPS receivers for civil use. I am delighted that the Spilker CDMA code family has been so successful and that today it is being used by more than four billion users around the world.”

When asked which GPS applications surprised him the most, Hugo Freuhauf said: “What surprised me the most was the general response from industry – it blew me away. The world’s tech industry reduced a 40lb (18kg), $100K backpack-sized GPS receiver into a fingernail-sized chip receiver that now costs less than $2. Because of that, GPS is everywhere; it is part of the global economic engine and key to global safe-keeping. It’s had an almost unimaginable impact on the globe.”

When asked about his future predictions for GPS, Richard Schwartz said: “It’s hard to imagine what young and creative engineers will come up with next – it’s such a rapidly developing world.

That said, in the not too distant future I think I will be able to step into a driverless car, tell the car where I’d like to go, and then sit back and enjoy the ride.

“The second prediction relates to farming, as we are already starting to see rapid innovation in agriculture. If farmers can precisely tend to their fields around the clock – at low cost – then food supply around the world will significantly increase, providing the next step towards ending world hunger.”

Lord Browne of Madingley, Chairman of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering

Foundation, said: “The 2019 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering recognises the four engineers responsible for providing accurate position and timing information for billions of people around the world. Their revolutionary work epitomises the excellence in engineering that the QEPrize both recognises and celebrates, and we hope that it continues to inspire the next generation of engineers to take up the challenges of the future.”

Professor Sir Christopher Snowden, Chair of the Judging Panel, said: “The global positioning system provides an outstanding example of engineering’s profound impact on society. It epitomises what the QEPrize stands for; starting with an almost impossible challenge, GPS is now universally accessible and benefits billions of people around the world each day. Over time its varied applications have profoundly transformed how society operates, and its impact will only continue to grow. This is exactly the type of groundbreaking engineering achievement that inspires young people to become tomorrow's engineers.”

The four winners will be formally honoured at a ceremony later this year; they will receive the £1 million prize and an iconic trophy designed by the 2019 Create the Trophy competition winner,

16 year-old Jack Jiang from Hong Kong.

Ends

Additional quotes from the judging panel

Dr Dan Mote, President of the US National Academy of Engineering, said of engineering:

“Currently, in the , about 5% of the undergraduate university degrees are given for engineering. That’s only around one in 20 graduates. But when you look at the Fortune 500 – the biggest companies in the world – the most common degree that these CEOs have is engineering. It’s not business, science, or psychology, it’s engineering. And that’s because engineers work on large scale initiatives, like GPS.

“Engineers start with a vision, then carry it through the goals and the solution process to implementation. Of course, that’s what big companies also do, which is why engineering is such a dominant field in places that people wouldn’t expect. Engineering thinking, engineering preparation, and engineering mentality is absolutely necessary for the kind of problems that society faces.”

Professor Mary Boyce at Columbia University, said of GPS: “The key contributions that we’re recognizing are the satellite systems, the radiation hardening of the satellite systems, the miniaturization of the atomic clock, and the programming to put all of this together in a way that accounts for time delays because of the relativity effects.

“All of these elements combined to create a powerful system that we are now able to have, literally, in the palm of our hand. And yet it’s transparent to us, it’s invisible. It’s open access, and it’s free for everyone. All of these elements together have changed modern society and are enabling new innovations that we never would have imagined.”

Dr Henry Yang at the University of California Santa Barbara, said of the prize: “I’ve been in engineering education all my life, first as a professor and now as a Chancellor, and so I was really happy to hear about the inception of the QEPrize, an award dedicated to the profession that impacts the world so profoundly.

“For the Queen to lend her name to something is to bestow immense prestige upon it. I think

Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering is a perfect example of this, and its award is a tremendous honour for the winners. As the world’s most prestigious and widely celebrated engineering accolade, it also provides a source of inspiration to engineers around the world.”

Professor Jim Al-Khalili at the University of Surrey, said of GPS: “GPS gives us a view of our planet that we’ve never had before. Everything from tracking ocean currents to tell us where fish are moving around in the oceans, to measuring the extent to which ice caps are melting – it’s all possible because of GPS. The technology gives us so much data on how the climate is changing, and it can both predict and help us to manage natural disasters. Having these eyes on our world from above is vitally important, and I think we’ve only just begun to explore some of its remarkable applications.

Ilya Marotta, from the Panama Canal Authority, said of GPS: “I think that one of the reasons why GPS is so powerful is because it’s so ubiquitous. I work in the Panama Canal, for example, where we use it daily to ships in the new locks, and we use it on our surveys for dredging operations. GPS is something that is used around the clock, all over the world, for a myriad of different applications.

Professor Lynn Gladden, at the University of Cambridge, said of GPS: “The difference that GPS has made to society is profound. So many people around the globe, and certainly almost everyone in the UK, has a mobile phone. We use that mobile phone to see where we are.

Aviation authorities, as another example, use GPS to track aircrafts. We all hail taxis, and we know both where taxis are and how long we have before they arrive.

“On a more scientific level, when you use even more accurate positioning technology then you can start looking at trends in environmental factors. We can see movements in tectonic plates, we can optimise agricultural practice, and we can track the rate at which ice caps melt. Its application is pervasive around the globe.

Dr Jean-Lou Chameau, President Emeritus at King Abdullah University of Science &

Technology, said of the winners: “To me, all the winners this year had something very important in common when they started working on GPS: vision. If you want to do something exciting that will be impactful in society, then the first thing you need to have is vision – you need to know where you want to go. Then as an engineer you can define goals, look at the hurdles you need to overcome, and put both a team and the steps in place to make it happen. But the vision has to be there, and the 2019 QEPrize winners certainly had that.”

Professor Viola Vogel at ETH Zurich, said of GPS: There’s an enormous gap between scribbling down an idea on a sheet of paper and, sometimes decades later, realising the final concept.

Developing GPS wasn’t an overnight endeavour, it was a commitment that took skill, ingenuity, and hard work. It was a colossal task to bring to fruition, but their hard work paid off, and GPS remains cutting-edge technology today.”

Paul Westbury, Group Technical Director at Laing O’Rourke, said of the prize: “Engineering makes the world work. All too often, however, their work goes unnoticed because engineering does such a great job of making the world work. The QEPrize is really important because it acknowledges these ground-breaking innovations, those that make us more productive, enable us to do an incredible array of new things in better ways. It provides visibility for the engineering profession.”

Dr Raghunath Mashelkar, Chairman of India’s National Innovation Foundation, said of the prize: “Turning good minds to engineering is a big challenge because people often think that engineering is all about building roads, buildings, and bridges. Yes, engineers are bridge builders, but they build the bridges between science and society. There’s a bigger purpose of the engineering profession. I think the QEPrize as a matter of fact positions engineers in a way they need to be positioned. We have Nobel prizes in Chemistry, Physics, and Medicine, but there are none in engineering. For the first time, engineers are being given their due for the difference they make to the world.”

Dr Hiroshi Komiyama, Chairman of Mitsubishi Research Institute, Inc, said of the prize: “The

QEPrize is a very important award. It considers the past, present, and future of the innovation, and is a symbol of pride and inspiration for the profession. Its essence is about how the expertise, creativity, and vision of brilliant engineers are put into practice to benefit billions of people. The profession needed this award.”

Jinghai Li, Vice president of the International Council for Science (ICSU) for Scientific Planning and Review, said of GPS: “A staggering number of people around the world use GPS – over 4 billion of us, perhaps more. If you have a modern smartphone, then you have GPS. I think one of the reasons why GPS is so impressive because it combines so many different aspects of engineering. It is a fantastic example of systems engineering; it combines such complex elements into such a complex system, and yet it does so in a way that is accessible to people all around the world.”

Brito Cruz, Science Director for the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), said of his experience with GPS: “In Brazil, GPS is used by millions of people. Not only are they using it through their cell phones as they navigate around, but the Brazilian economy depends – and will depend more and more – on GPS because of the developments in precision agriculture. Precision agriculture has allowed Brazil to advance in agricultural efficiency and productivity, which will help it to maintain its position as one of the main food producers in the world.”

Professor Reinhard Huettl, Scientific Executive Director and Chairman of GFZ-Potsdam, said of the prize: “The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering gives engineers a recognition in the same kind of magnitude as the Nobel prize. The next generation of engineers know the fundamentality of their work in society, but they also need to be able to see their profession acknowledged for it. Engineers keep the world moving, and there needs to be recognition for that. That’s why this prize is so important.”

Interview Requests

For more information or to request an interview with any of the judging panel please contact [email protected]

Assets

Stills and official QEPrize logos are available to download from: http://qeprize.org/press

@QEPrize #QEPrize2019

Edelman

Alex Garvey [email protected] +44 (0)20 3047 2259

Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering

Jonathan Narbett [email protected] +44 (0)20 7766 0661

Ryan Gibson [email protected] +44 (0)20 7766 0688

About the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering

The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (QEPrize) is the world’s most prestigious engineering prize, celebrating the engineers responsible for a ground-breaking innovation in engineering that has been of global benefit to humanity. The £1million prize is awarded every two years; it aims to raise the public profile of engineering and inspire young people to take up the engineering challenges of the future.

The inaugural winners in 2013 were Robert Kahn, , Louis Pouzin, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen for revolutionising the way we communicate. Their seminal contributions led to the development of the Internet, the World Wide Web, and the Mosaic browser. In 2015, the QEPrize was awarded to Dr Robert Langer for his revolutionary advances and leadership in engineering at the interface with chemistry and medicine. His pioneering work in controlled release large molecule drug delivery systems has benefitted the lives of more than two billion people worldwide. In 2017, Eric Fossum, George Smith, Nobukazu Teranishi, and Michael

Tompsett were awarded the prize for their combined contributions to digital imaging.

About the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation

The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation was established to administer the Queen

Elizabeth Prize for Engineering and is based at the Royal Academy of Engineering.

The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering is funded by generous support from the following corporate donors: BAE Systems plc, BP plc, GlaxoSmithKline, Hitachi, Ltd., Jaguar Land Rover,

National Grid plc, Nissan Motor Corporation, Shell UK Ltd, Siemens UK, Sony, Tata Steel Europe,

Tata Consultancy Services, and Toshiba.