Ed Tuck dies — created handheld GPS receiver

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 a narrow runway through a thick fog bank — was much harder than it should be.

It was 1985, and the Army veteran had heard of an emerging military technology known as the Global Positioning System. Dreamed up by the Navy and Air Force more than a decade earlier, it relied on satellites still being tested and launched into space and bulky groundbased receivers that were expensive and hard to use.

There was 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 handheld 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; helped lost road-trippers pretend they know exactly where they’re going; and allowed countless schoolkids to avoid learning how to properly read a map.

Tuck was forced for decades to remind people he was not the inventor of GPS, a title generally given to 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, working at firms that made everything from Mickey Mouse phones to optical character scanners, who insisted the GPS could and should be shrunk to pocket size.

Tuck died at a nursing home in Charlotte, N.C., his daughter Jean McGregor said.