The whole saga starts with a beep. In 1957, two American physicists sat listening to Sputnik and noticed its radio tone rose and fell as it passed overhead, a Doppler shift. If you could hear a satellite's motion, they realised, you could work out where it was. Flip that logic around, and if you know where the satellite is, you can work out where you are.
That flip became the Transit system for submarines, then, in the 1970s, the far more ambitious project the world now calls GPS. It was military first, a way to drop things precisely and know where your forces stood. Civilians were an afterthought given a deliberately degraded signal, blurred for national-security nerves.
The turning point was tragic. After a civilian airliner strayed into forbidden airspace and was shot down in 1983, the United States pledged to open GPS to the world for free. The blur, called Selective Availability, lingered until 2000, when it was switched off overnight and civilian accuracy suddenly improved tenfold. Car navigation, geotagging, and the blue dot all bloomed from that single decision.
Others built their own. The Soviet Union flew GLONASS in parallel. Europe launched Galileo to avoid depending on a foreign military system. China raised BeiDou from regional to global. Today the sky holds more than a hundred navigation satellites, a quiet international infrastructure most of us never think about. Our constellations explainer introduces the whole family.
It is a story worth knowing because it reframes the technology. GNSS was not built to watch you; it was built so ships, planes, and lost drivers could answer where am I without asking anyone's permission. The genius is that it gives, and never takes. A prank tracker like this one borrows the mythology of that history for laughs, but the real history is the better story, and a kinder one.