Long before GPS, drivers still wanted tech that could simplify the navigation process. //
Maps of America’s largest cities first appeared in the 18th century, and—incredibly—so did the first road atlas. In 1789, “The Survey of the Roads of the United States of America,” by Christopher Colles of New York mapped roads from Williamsburg, Virginia, to Albany, New York. However, it didn’t come as a complete volume—it was instead subscription based. Subscribers were expected to gather the plates together into a coherent atlas. Colles printed 83 plates in three years, each containing two or three maps. But the business faltered for one simple reason: there was little use for road maps in the United States in the late 1700s. //
By the late 19th century, most American roads had hardly changed from a century earlier, being little more than paths cut through the countryside by Native Americans and the wild animals humanity was hunting. Later, these paths were enlarged into wagon roads and improved by removing tree stumps and grading the dirt road’s surface, smoothing out any bumps or ruts. There was no federal system for building roads, so federal highways didn’t exist. Most trips were short and made on local roads by residents who already knew where they were going, so there was no need for road signs. It’s little wonder that until the early 20th century, most cross-country treks meant traveling by rail, not carriage. It’s also why Rand McNally’s first map, printed in 1872, was a railroad guide.
But the arrival of the automobile in 1895 changed all that. //
It was Jones who had invented the “Speed-O-Meter,” a device he installed on a Winton for a 1901 endurance run from New York to Buffalo. He applied for a patent in 1903, which was issued the following year. It used a flexible shaft cable and a gear-driven attachment to a front wheel, a set-up Jones would use in another invention, the “Combined Road-Map and Odometer.”
The Live Map was a glass-enclosed brass dial attached to the outer edge of the driver's side of the car and linked via a cable to a car’s odometer. Before leaving on your drive, you would purchase one of the company’s 8-inch paper discs with a trip’s directions, put together by The Touring Club of America. Each disc contained a trip’s mileage on the edge of the disc, with each tick mark symbolizing one mile, and supplementary tick marks for every fifth of a mile. Directions were printed alongside key mileage points like spokes on a wheel, describing road surfaces (paved or dirt), intersections, and rail crossings.
The disc was placed on the dial’s turntable. The driver would put the disc in the machine at the trip’s starting point. As the driver progressed, the disc rotated proportionally to your car’s speed, telling you what to do, what to look for, and where to turn. Each disc covered about 100 miles, at which point you pulled over and stopped to replace the disc with the next one. //
The meter cost $75 and included 12 disks. Additional disks cost 25 cents each, or you could purchase multiple discs for 15 cents. An advertisement in the Saturday Evening Post boasted that, "To have it with you is like having in your car a man who knows every road, every corner, every crossing, every landmark, every puzzling fork and crossroad in the entire world.”
By 1919, Jones offered more than 500 routes from New York to California, but Jones was not alone in this emerging market. In fact, Jones' device was rejected by the US Patent Office five times for its similarities to other devices.
