I’m Feeling Lucky

I read this book a while back called ‘Longitude’ by Dava Sobel. Her book was all about clocks, and it was the best book about clocks I have ever read. You see apparently for hundreds of years it had been difficult and dangerous to conduct long sea voyages because no accurate method of calculating your correct longitude existed. This had led to many disasters and amusing misdirections throughout the years. One group of people however who did not think it was very funny was the British Navy who had seen many a fleet go astray. With ambitions of empire this simply wouldn’t do and so the King established a prize fund for the first person to invent a clock that would remain accurate regardless of its location. While we all carry such devices on our wrists these days, back then (the 18th Century) it was not so simple. You see if you held such a device then through some mathematical trick involving time zones and star charts you could accurately (and quickly) calculate your longitude and hence location. The story progresses from there with the hero being a simple and comparatively uneducated mechanic called John Harrison who went up against all the leading scientific figures and establishments to finally claim the prize and revolutionise seafaring.

It used to be a common thing for the King to set up challenges such as these to stimulate competition and innovation. Regrettably that tradition has been lost and I can only dream of how fantastic it would be if it was reinvented today, but hey ho. Instead what we have today is the X-Prize Foundation.

In 2004 the first X-Prize, called the ‘Ansari X-Prize’ was won by Burt Rutan for piloting his privately funded air/spacecraft into orbit twice in two weeks. Rutan was funded by Paul Allen of Microsoft fame and the technology is now being used by Richard Branson to start ‘Virgin Galactic’. Many groups competed for this prize and while there was only one winner the technologies developed by the other groups are still in use and still being developed to compete in the new space tourist industry which the Ansari prize almost single handily created.

Other prizes have been established since with the newest being quite possibly the most exciting. The ‘Google Lunar X-Prize’ was announced two days ago and will offer $20,000,0000 to the first group to safely land a rover on the moon and have it travel at least 500 meters and transmit high definition video. There are further cash incentives for other features, such as a further $5,000,000 if it can capture images of other man-made objects on the moon. Perhaps they will find the filming studio that Neil Armstrong used.

Anyway, I love all this stuff. I think offering cash incentives for innovation is a top-notch idea. As the Soviets found out to their detriment, humans are only ever motivated by riches, and we should always look for ways to tap the potential of human greed. It is after all our most progressive quality. I think it should be taught at school. Greed coaching. Would make for a far better world – it’s true!

To hell with the commies.