The concept of prizes has been around for thousands of years. In Homer’s Iliad, Achilles stands atop a funeral pyre and calls on his warriors to compete in a prize to honor his companion, Patroclus, in death. “Sons of Atreus, you other well-armed Achaean warriors, these prizes lie set out here for a contest among the charioteers,” he tells them. The reward? Gold and horses. “Once Achilles finished speaking, swift charioteers rushed into action,” wrote Homer.
In the years since the 8th century BC, prizes have come a long way, and have shaped our modern world. Without incentive prizes, we might not have canned food, aviation or private space travel, and we might not have discovered many of the unexpected heroes and heroines of science, tech, and mathematics that we have today – the innovators and inventors who inspire us to keep making the discoveries and breakthroughs that drive society forward. John Harrison, an unknown carpenter and clockmaker from Yorkshire, in the North of England, is one such hero.
Harrison created the marine chronometer, a long-sought-after device for solving the problem of calculating longitude while at sea, and was the beneficiary of one of the first-ever incentive prizes in the field of technology: the longitude prize. In 1707, four warships sank off the Southwestern coast of Britain, carrying as many as 2000 sailors. The disaster was attributed to bad weather, but also the navigators’ inability to accurately calculate their position. In reaction, the British government under Queen Anne set up a prize. Issued by a body called the Commissioners for the Discovery of the Longitude at Sea in 1714, the prize offered three purses for methods that could determine longitude within various degrees of accuracy, the rewards increasing the more accurate the solutions were. Prizes ranged from around $2M to $4M in today’s money, with smaller purses awarded for useful breakthroughs along the way. The British Empire’s smartest minds entered the competition, including Sir Isaac Newton (now well known for inventing the calculus and the theory of gravity). Yet nobody could come up with a solution for longitude within 30 nautical miles. That is, until Harrison successfully created a clock that was reliable and accurate enough, even at sea.
“Incentive prizes have accomplished a lot of important innovations over the years,” explains XPRIZE’s Shlomy Kattan. “They gave us an accurate method for calculating longitude at sea, which enables maritime travel, they've given us the modern method for food preservation, and they're one of the key reasons we have a thriving private space industry. I think what these prizes do best is tap into the idea that genius that can come from anyone and anywhere. Along with John Harrison, there was Nicolas Appert, the father of canning food, who was a confectioner and chef.”
XPRIZE is based on this idea: that genius can be found anywhere. “XPRIZE competitions have been won by an architect who developed a device for converting condensation into potable water,” Shlomy explains, “a doctor who sought to improve telehealth, and a team of middle schoolers inspired to explore the mysteries of our oceans.” This has demonstrated time and time again that the idea that genius can come from anywhere isn’t just an idea, it’s proven to be true. However, the question remains: Why a Prize? What’s so useful about incentivizing these kinds of discoveries, rather than letting them happen organically?
“What an XPRIZE does and what an incentive prize is great for is accelerating the path of science and technology from basic research to the product design section of that research,” Shlomy tells us. “That means that we're helping to take things that currently exist on paper or in a lab or in the pre-prototype stage, and we're creating an incentive structure that makes them real and allows them to begin to scale. An XPRIZE is not an end in itself. It's a means, but it's a means that gets us to that desired end goal faster, more effectively, and more efficiently than other methods do.”
By providing technical support, a structured framework, and timeline, plus financial backing, XPRIZEs materially help an idea or a prototype grow into a reality. This was true of the first XPRIZE, launched by our founder, Peter H. Diamandis, in 1995: The $10M Ansari XPRIZE for space travel, awarded to the first team whose spacecraft could lift three people 100km skyward twice in the space of two weeks (the technology that won went on to become Virgin Galactic).
It’s also true of our latest prize, the biggest private incentive prize in history: The $100M XPRIZE Carbon Removal, funded by Elon Musk and The Musk Foundation. This prize is designed to spur the technology that will fight climate change by removing carbon from the atmosphere at a gigaton-per-year scale.
“Why a competition, why not just invest a hundred million dollars directly in existing technologies or in reforestation, or reducing our dependence on energy sources that emit massive amounts of CO2?” says Shlomy. “First, let's be clear – XPRIZE competitions are not a panacea, we should all reduce our carbon footprint, we should all decrease our dependence on carbon-emitting technologies, but we also urgently need to accelerate innovation to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere that we've already emitted. Current methods cannot remove at the necessary scale.”
In other words, we’re at such a critical moment for climate change that we need a prize this big to make the impact required to slow global warming, and we need a prize to incentivize the acceleration of the development of this technology. With temperatures constantly rising, sea levels rising with them, and forest fires ravaging our planet, we are running out of time.
“I have two young children and when I think of the purpose of the work that we do here at XPRIZE, I know that it's truly about trying to help assure a hopeful and abundant future for them and for the generations to come,” Shlomy concludes. “But the only reason we have a chance is because of a collective effort: we need to work together to find the next John Harrison or the next Nicolas Appert. Climate change is the challenge of our time and carbon removal is one of the most important things that we can do about it. So let's get to work together to find a solution.”