In August and September 1977, the newspaper comic strip The Amazing Spider-Man ran a story in which the villain Kingpin attached a tracking device to Spider-Man. A judge in New Mexico named Jack Love read the strip and thought about how useful such a device would be to monitor whether someone convicted of drunk driving were to leave their home at night against court orders. Other people had considered such a device, but it was Judge Love that saw the project through to successful testing in the real world. He enlisted engineer Michael Goss to make the device, and tested it on himself first in 1983. The Goss-Link, as the prototype was called, sent a signal every 60 seconds to the wearer's land line phone, which dialed a central computer. If the wearer was more than 150 feet from the home phone, the calls would not happen, and an alert was sent to find the wearer. Then the judge launched a pilot program and put ankle monitors on three offenders under court supervision. Read the story of how ankle monitors came about, which includes The Amazing Spider-Man strip, at Gizmodo.
(Image credit: Karl Gustafson)