Global Positioning Systems (GPS) were first developed by the United States Department of Defense intended for military use.
May 1st, 2000-President Clinton announced that this technology would now be available to civilians with an accuracy point within 10 meters.
May 3rd, 2000- Portland, Oregon native, Dave Ulmer celebrated this major technological event by hiding a bucket of trinkets in the woods on the outskirts of the city and announcing the the location in a posting made to USENET newsgroup. With this posting, a new hobby was born known as "Stashing".
Within one day the first stash was found and logged. As the days past, more stashed had been hidden in various states and within a month stashes had been found as far away as Australia. The hobby had become a worldwide trend.
May 8th, 2000- Mike Teague began a website to collect the locations of the treasure chests that had grown into the name, "stashes." This site is not longer in existence but still archived on the Wayback Machine.
May 15th, 2000- James Coburn began a mailing list on eGroups (part of Yahoo!) for a discussion of geocaching (this was the original layout for what would become 'wikis' today). The list is archived and is known as the best record of the early days of this hobby.
May 30th, 2000- Matt Sturn suggested to change the name from "Stashing" to "Geocaching" in order to avoid negative connotations.
Sept. 2, 2000- Jeremy Irish contacted gpsstash mailing list saying that he had registered the domain name, geocaching.com and had set up the site with help from Mike Teague's database and later all handling was passed from Teague to Irish. Irish looked for ways to capitalize on the hobby, which was not supported and lead to multiple controversies.
May, 2001- California geocacher, Ed Hall (aka Buxley) created online maps pinpointing the locations of geocahces. Though this was a major step, Irish was not pleased and threatened legal action, creating further controversy.
Today, geocaching remains a popular activity and has even been idolized in the independent film, Splinterheads (2009).
Works Cited:
Scout. "The History of Geocaching." Geocaching. GPSgames.org. Web. 24 Oct. 2010.
"YouTube - Splinterheads Geocaching Teaser." YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. Web. 24 Oct. 2010.
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