Turn-by-turntables: How drivers got from point A to point B in the early 1900s

After graduating from Ohio State, I moved out to Newport Beach, California for my first post-college job. The company arranged for help finding an apartment in the area, which includes 1.5 days of apartment-hunting, and generally getting used to the area.<p>My father &amp; a friend helped me out by driving the bulk of my stuff out to California. The guide was happy to use her AAA of California membership to get a custom trip guide made. It wasn&#x27;t as novel as the turntable, but it was very nice!<p>And of course, the first thing I did when I moved in was to go to a bookstore and buy the Thomas Guide covering Orange County.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;laist.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;06&#x2F;22&#x2F;thomas_guide_maps_the_rise_and_fall.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;laist.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;06&#x2F;22&#x2F;thomas_guide_maps_the_rise_and_...</a>

Navigating in a car was a problem even when I started driving in the early 2000s, before GPS.<p>- If you just had a map book you&#x27;d have to study it before a journey to get the likely placenames you&#x27;d see. This is surprisingly hard.<p>- You&#x27;d probably forget to check one-way systems.<p>- You could sort of guess where there&#x27;d be traffic, but for any major diversions you had to be very careful to follow the ad-hoc signs. Plus there&#x27;s a high chance that you would decide you&#x27;d lost the way if the gap between signs was too long.<p>- You really needed to know the major geographic placenames by heart. Even if you&#x27;re not going to Manchester, you will need to know whether on your trip to Birmingham to follow the road to Manchester. Now picture driving in a foreign country.<p>- Forget about estimating the time to get there. If it&#x27;s a place you don&#x27;t know your route will not be ideal.<p>- Conveniences like the next petrol station off the road, forget it.

The map being physically connected to the odometer, albeit by a long cable, seems like a good idea but this feels like an early example of how hardware engineering and software engineering (in this case, UX) are quite separate skill sets!<p>It’s a cute idea but an unnecessary (and literal) coupling of the measurement function with the route information.<p>There’s a reason that numerical odometers with dual absolute &#x2F; trip delta readings caught on — far more flexible.

This reminded me of something similar: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gajitz.com&#x2F;scrolling-down-the-highway-vintage-1927-analog-gps&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gajitz.com&#x2F;scrolling-down-the-highway-vintage-1927-a...</a><p>It&#x27;s a watch-like, wrist device called the &quot;Plus Four Wristlet Route Indicator&quot;, and it dates back to 1927.

Kari from Mythbusters built a replica of this, and another version that uses scrolls, on the netflix show White Rabbit Project (S01E09). It actually worked better than I thought it would.

I’ve always thought it would be cool to have a printed out minimum spanning tree starting from my house (or work) with miles marked out on it. You wouldn’t need OSM or google maps then!

Not completely related ro tnis article, however there are some good arguments thst road infrastructure played key role in human development. Imagine trying to get from somewhere in Poland to England through forests, swamps and fields... Trade and knowledge sharing went through the roof once people started building roads and connecting towns and cities.

Have to give some love to TripTiks, from AAA - the precursor to printed directions from the computer:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;magazine.northeast.aaa.com&#x2F;daily&#x2F;travel&#x2F;road-trips&#x2F;paper-maps-triptiks-still&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;magazine.northeast.aaa.com&#x2F;daily&#x2F;travel&#x2F;road-trips&#x2F;p...</a>

A modern form of this is the Dakar roadbook for the Dakar off-road rally: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dakar.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;espace-ccr&#x2F;navigation&#x2F;roadbook" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dakar.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;espace-ccr&#x2F;navigation&#x2F;roadbook</a>

That&#x27;s pretty ingenious.

This page somehow crashes my Firefox.