Up for auction a RARE! "GPS Developer" Bradford Parkinson Hand Signed Novelty Card.
ES-7912
Bradford
Parkinson (February 16,
1935) is an American engineer and inventor, retired United States Air Force Colonel and recalled emeritus Professor at Stanford University. He is
best known as the lead architect, advocate and developer, with early
contributions from Ivan Getting and Roger Easton, of the Air Force NAVSTAR program, better known
as Global Positioning System.
He was also the principal investigator and program manager on Gravity Probe B, which tested gravitomagnetism and was the first ever direct mechanical
test of Einstein’s General Relativity. He
has received numerous awards and honors for GPS and contributions to
engineering and invention, including the Charles Stark Draper Prize, National Inventors Hall of
Fame, and IEEE Medal of Honor, among
others. In 2019, Bradford Parkinson shared the Queen Elizabeth Prize for
Engineering with three other GPS pioneers (James Spilker, Hugo Freuhauf, and
Richard Schwartz). For his secondary education, the younger Parkinson attended
the Breck School, then a
small, all-boys preparatory school, graduating in 1952. Parkinson has credited
his experiences at the Breck School for inspiring in him an early love of math
and science, an interest which eventually became his life's calling. Parkinson
was a distinguished graduate of the United States Naval
Academy, graduating in 1957 with a Bachelor of Science in
Engineering. While studying there, Parkinson discovered he had a deep interest
in controls engineering, which was introduced in a Senior Level course at the
time. Fortunately, one of Parkinson's Electrical Engineering professors
was an Air Force officer who urged him to consider being commissioned in the
Air Force rather than the Navy. Parkinson also knew he wanted to get a Ph.D.
later in life, and the Air Force was more receptive to graduate and
post-graduate education at this time. After
being commissioned in the Air Force, he was trained in electronics maintenance
and supervised large ground radar installations
in Washington state. He then
was sponsored by USAF to attend MIT,
studying controls engineering, inertial guidance, astronautics and electrical engineering. Parkinson
worked in the lab of Charles Stark Draper, the
namesake for the prestigious Draper Prize which Parkinson went on to win later
in his life. At MIT, he received a Master of Science in Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1961 and was elected to the Tau Beta Pi and Sigma Xi honor Societies. Parkinson was then
assigned to work at the Central Inertial Guidance Test Facility at Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, New Mexico. There he developed tests and was a Chief Analyst
for the evaluation of the Air Force’s inertial guidance systems and continued
work on electrical and controls engineering. In 1964, after three years at
Holloman, Parkinson was assigned to a Ph.D. program at Stanford University
graduating in 1966, with a degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics.