The History of Geocaching
GPS, or Global Positioning System, was developed by the US
Department of Defense. This satellite navigation system was
intended for military use and therefore the signals were scrambled,
limiting accuracy for civilian use to about 100 meters. On May 1,
2000, President Clinton announced that this scrambling, known as
Selective Availability (SA), would be turned off. Civilians were
then able to enjoy accuracy on the order of 10 meters.
On May 3, 2000, Dave Ulmer proposed a way to celebrate the
demise of SA. He hid a bucket of trinkets in the woods outside
Portland, Oregon and announced its location in a posting made to
the USENET newsgroup sci.geo.satellite-nav. This announcement is
remarkable for laying out the essence of the hobby that is still in
place today. It's all there. The container. The trinkets. The log
book. The rule of take something, leave something, sign the
logbook. Dave Ulmer invented geocaching in one fell swoop in that
newsgroup posting.
Within a day, the original stash had been found. Within days,
more stashes had been hidden in California, Kansas, and Illinois.
Within a month, a stash had been hidden as far away as Australia.
The hobby was fast on its way to being a worldwide phenomenon.
On May 8, Mike Teague announced a Web site for collecting the
locations of caches. The original Web page is gone, but thanks to
the Wayback Machine, a copy of the GPS Stash Hunt Homepage still
exists.
On May 15, James Coburn set up a mailing list on eGroups (now
Yahoo!) for discussion of geocaching. The list is still in
existence. Its archives contain the best record of the early days
of the hobby.
On May 30, a new name was coined for the hobby. Matt Stum
suggested "geocaching" to avoid the negative connotations of the
word "stash".
So, within a month, the hobby had in place the rules, its first
hides and finds, a mailing list and a home page. And the number of
caches was growing fast.
As of April 30 201 @ 10:50p, There are
1,052,723 active caches and an estimated 3-4 million geocachers
worldwide.
Celebrate 10 years of geocaching on May 1,
2010 by finding this cache &/or attending our 10 Years Event
event.