Investor made GPS for the masses
Ed Tuck, an investor and electrical engineer, was flying his twin-engine Beechcraft Baron through the clouds of Northern California when it struck him that landing his plane — searching for the narrow runway through a thick band of fog — was much harder than it should be.
It was1985, and Tuck, a U.S. army veteran, had heard about an emerging military technology known as the Global Positioning System. Dreamed up by the navy and air force more than a decade earlier, GPS relied on satellites that were still being tested and launched into space and on bulky ground-based receivers that were expensive and difficult to use.
There remained little interest in the system until Tuck, who died June 26 at 85, brought the technology down to earth.
As the founder of Magellan, he manufactured the first hand-held GPS receiver for the general public — and demonstrated the mass appeal for a technology that has permitted smartphone users to find the closest late-night Thai restaurant and helped lost road-trippers pretend they know exactly where they’re going.
Tuck was forced for decades to remind people that he was not the inventor of GPS, a title that is generally bestowed upon Roger Easton, a physicist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory who died in 2014.
But it was Tuck, a tinkerer who leapt from business to business, who insisted that the GPS could and should be shrunk down to pocket size. He also assembled the team and funding to make it happen.
Through his investment company, he formed what became known as the Magellan Systems Corp. He hired engineers to develop software and hardware for his new device, which he hoped to carry in his shirt pocket and use on flights up the California coast.
The device that Tuck and his team eventually produced, the Magellan GPS NAV 1000, ultimately sold for $3,000 (U.S.) in 1989. It was waterproof, weighed a pound and a half, ran on six AA batteries and offered precision that was, Boating magazine wrote in a review, “pleasantly startling.”
When the global network of 24 GPS satellites became fully operational in the mid-1990s, Magellan and followers such as Garmin and Tom-Tom became ever more popular and accurate. The company was also given an unexpected boost during the Persian Gulf War, when GPS had widespread use in combat for the first time.
“I don’t think it’s nice to say that wars are lucky,” Tuck said of the timing. “But it was lucky that we had one at that particular time — if we were going to have one.”
Tuck died at a nursing home in Charlotte, N.C., his daughter Jean McGregor said, and had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. His wife of 60 years, the former Janet Barber, died in April.
Survivors include two daughters, Jean McGregor of Waxhaw, N.C., and Ann Tuck of Accra, Ghana; and five grandchildren.
“I used to tease him about how none of my kids can read maps thanks to him,” McGregor said. “He thought that was all right. ‘That’s too bad,’ he’d say, ‘but oh well.’ ”