Jewish Invention Myths: GPS Navigation/Waze

A common ‘jewish myth’ – (1) as well as something often touted as an ‘Israeli achievement’ – (2) is the claim that jews invented modern GPS navigation specifically in cars.

This is itself a subsidiary claim to the similarly false claim that jews created the geosynchronous satellite and thus paved the way for GPS satellites; this was not created by the jew Harold Rosen – who simply ‘oversaw the team’ and falsely took the credit because he was the team’s manager – but rather by two Americans under him named Don Williams and Tom Hudspeth in the 1950s and 1960s; further the concept was first created by the Slovene engineer Herman Potocnik in 1928/1929 in Vienna, while the British inventor and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke refined Potocnik’s ideain an article titled ‘Extra-Terrestrial Relays’ in the October 1945 edition of ‘Wireless World’. (3)

Waze was originally created as ‘FreeMap Israel’ by Ehud Shabtai – a veteran of the IDF’s signal intelligence corps ‘Unit 8200’ – in 2006 as a crowd-sourced project and then turned into the company Waze in 2008 by Shabtai and two other former members of ‘Unit 8200’: Amir Shinar, and Uri Levine. (4)

The problem with this is that Waze is not the first GPS navigation tool in cars – let alone in general – with the fourth generation Mazda Eunos Cosmo being the first car to have a built-in GPS navigation tool in 1990. (5)

Furthermore, Waze’s allegedly unique/signature ‘Turn-by-Turn’ system was actually invented two decades earlier in 1988 by James Raymond Davis and Christopher Schmandt at MIT and called ‘Backdoor Driver’. (6)

While the combined system of ‘turn-by-turn’ GPS navigation combined street-maps, house numbers and places was originally invented by an Austrian software company named ‘bitMAP’ – whose head of research was Werner Liebig – but whose product was presented at Comdex in Las Vegas in 1993 but were not adopted and may have been in fact stolen. (7)

Put another way: jews didn’t ‘invent’ GPS navigation in general or in cars at all but rather have taken a long extant technology of non-jewish origin and claimed that they in fact invented it.

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References

(1) For example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Jewish/comments/18q24ls/what_are_some_things_that_were_invented_by_jews/?rdt=58394

(2) For example: https://www.jewishla.org/israeli-inventions-waze/

(3) On this see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jewish-invention-myths-the-geosynchronous

(4) https://www.jewishla.org/israeli-inventions-waze/

(5) https://www.sygic.com/blog/2018/car-navigation-history

(6) https://www.media.mit.edu/speech/papers/1989/davis_VNIS89_backseat_driver.pdf

(7) https://www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at/Bitmap_Digital_City_Map also cf. Werner Liebig, 2018, ‘Mit falschen Karten: Mein wahres Erfinderschicksal’, 1st Edition, Books on Demand: Internet