They say money can’t buy you love. True, but sometimes it can buy you a solution.
There are a lot of very smart, very talented people out there, but there are even more ideas begging to be realised, all crying out for the best talent to make them real. Sometimes there needs be be a little bit of an incentive to get these talented people working to realise your idea. Sometimes it needs a really big incentive to get things moving.
Time to put your money where your mouth is.
On several occasions the course of history has been changed by the desire of someone with the talent and drive to win a huge pile of cash. Here’s a run down of some of the best prize funds, both past and present, to get the talent moving.
Methuselah Prize
Who doesn’t want to live forever? The guys at the Methuselah Foundation sure do, and are offering a bounty for extending the lifespan of a mouse or rejuvenating a mouse already in old age.
Anyone breaking the record (currently 1,819 days) for mouse longevity wins a share of the prize pool, which currently sits at $1,400,000!
Ansari X-Prize
Space, the final frontier. Since the moon landing, space travel has got a little bit boring, a little too routine, but not a huge amount more efficient.
The Ansari X-Prize aimed to change that, offering $10,000,000 for the team that produced an spacecraft capable of carrying three people to 100 kilometres above the earth and then doing the same again within two weeks.
Announced in 1996 and award only 8 years later in 2004, the prize was won by the pioneering SpaceShipOne of Scaled Composites. Just goes to show what a little incentive can do.
Google Lunar X-Prize
Now that the original X-Prize has been claimed, Google has set out to push the frontiers of commercial space flight even further with the Lunar X-Prize.
Offering $30,000,000 in prizes to whichever private company can land safely on the surface of the moon, traverse 500 meters, and transmit two ‘Mooncasts’ back to Earth, the Lunar X-Prize is trying to make moon exploration fashionable again after it fell out of favour with the bigger space agencies.
Be aware though, time is short as a deadline of December 31, 2015 is in effect.
Carma Prize
Every single day, millions of people around the world choose to drive to work alone. They willingly prolong their commute, maximize its cost, and dramatically increase their carbon footprint.
Our cities are choking, both literally and figuratively, from the number of cars on the road, and without intervention, it’s only going to get worse.
Carma is working hard to crack the problem of traffic congestion, and the costs and pollution it causes. Their solution is simple, very person that carpools is one less car on the road. But old habits die hard, and getting people to give up their shiny metal boxes, even just once a week is a monumental task.
Carma is offering $1,000,000 to any developer, or team of developers, that can produce an app that gets 10,000 people carpooling.
Orteig Prize
In 1919, powered flight was still in it’s infancy when Raymond Orteig offered a $25,000 ($340,000 as of 2014) prize to the first aviator to fly non-stop from New York to Paris or vice-versa.
Famously, this prize was claimed by Charles Lindbergh in the Spirit of Saint Louis in 1927, and would go on to be the inspiration for many other prize funds throughout the years, including the afore mentioned X-Prize.
From the birth of powered, heavier-than-air flight to the first successful commercial spacecraft in only 101 years. What a way we’ve come.
Napoleon’s Food Preservation Prize
An army marches on its stomach so they say, but the 18th century wasn’t exactly the heyday of food preservation. So, in 1800, when Napoleon Bonaparte wanted to feed his army while not spoiling the taste by salting or pickling (well, it was a French army) he offered 12,000 Francs to whoever could his the culinary dilemma.
15 years later, Nicolas Francois Appert claimed the prize by bottling and boiling food, and later on using his prize money to invent the tin can.
While Appert’s invention didn’t save Napoleon from eventual defeat, we can thank him for the process that lead to ‘Breakfast in a Can’!
http://www.foodquality.com/details/article/1023773/The_Father_of_Food_Preservation.html?tzcheck=1&tzcheck=1
Qualcom Tricorder X-Prize
Sometimes it can be a little difficult to get a medical diagnosis Sometimes you don’t know that you need to see a doctor — until you’ve seen a doctor.
Qualcom is offering $10,000,000 to the creator of a Star Trek-esque tricorder — a wireless, handheld scanner capable of measuring a number of key health metrics (pulse, blood pressure, temperature, etc) and providing an accurate diagnosis.
The Longitude Problem
Sailing can be pretty dangerous at times, especially if you have no way to know where exactly it is you are!
In the 16th century, the seafaring nations at the time thought it would be pretty convenient for their sailors to know their longitude, so Britain, Spain and the Netherlands all offered what came to be the granddaddy of big idea prizes for whoever could figure out how to figure out longitude.
Only 200 years later, John Harrison cracked the problem, and led directly to British Naval dominance. Thanks John!
http://www.rmg.co.uk/explore/astronomy-and-time/time-facts/harrison
Other Prizes
Don’t think you can make it to the moon, or breed mice that outlive dogs? Maybe you’re looking to cut your teeth on something a little smaller?
Hutter Prize — Can you compress? Compress 100MB of Wikipedia to win cash prizes. How low can you go?
Loebner Prize — Lets get all Bladerunner. Can you build an AI that’ll beat the Turing Test? It’s worth $2000 if you can.
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