by barbara sirrot

Created on: June 06, 2008   Last Updated: June 07, 2008

When the prize is big enough things get done in an amazingly short period of time. So it has been for a long time. The Raymond Ortega Prize of $25000 for the first flight across the Atlantic spurred Charles Lindberg to fly the Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic in 1927. A prize for the first balloon to circumnavigate the globe was awarded in 1999 to Bertrand Piccard and Bryan Jones . Anheuser-Busch Company offered a trophy and a one million dollar prize (one half of which was to be donated to charity) to the winning team. The phrase "Keep your eye on the prize" is more meaningful than ever in our day of an shrinking resource base and profound problems with the climate on our planet.

Prizes of this type had been a part of the inventors landscape for hundreds of years. The early one that comes to mind is the Longitude Prize offer up by the British government in 1714 for the creation of a devise that would measure longitude precisely. This prize was administered by the Board of Longitude. Because the board could not come to agreement on the requirements, the prize was never awarded. The results of offering this prize was the chronometer, invented by John Harrison. In an age when the position of the moon and stars was the only way to navigate our oceans, such a devise was of great benefit to exploration and commerce. Harrison did receive over 14,000 pounds as seed money to do his research and was later given a gift by Parliament in gratitude for his work. But the glory of receiving the prize was withheld from him. A book by Dava Sobel called "Longitude" recounts Harrison life.

And the X Prize is the next generation of the GRAND PRIZE. One of these prizes is waiting out there for the person that can invent a car that goes 100 on one mile of gas, is clean efficient and marketable. Progressive Automobile Insurance has teamed up with the X Prize Foundation to offer $10,000,000 to the team that creates such a car and to this date 60 teams from around the world have signed up to compete. One such car is produced by Aptera Motors and is on the market today at somewhere around $30,000. In fact you can reserve one at their web site for $500.

The X Prize Foundation's mission statement says simply that they want "To bring about radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity". The foundation is supported through contributions from individuals and partnerships with businesses like Google and Progressive Automobile Insurance. One of the goal of the foundation is to see

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