These days an in-car satellite navigation system (sat nav) is viewed almost as much an essential as a steering wheel to the extent that many motorists either do not carry a conventional paper-based map or have forgotten how to read them. GPS (Global Positioning System) has been operational since 1978 but was only made available globally in 1994 but sat navs, boosted by the launch of Google Street View in 2008, have been very much a 21st century phenomenon.
For the early motorist getting around was quite a challenge with little in the way of standardized road signage or even handy-sized maps of the locale. An early attempt to provide assistance to the pioneering motorist was a guide book entitled Photo Auto Maps, compiled by Gardner S. Chapin and Arthur Schumacher and published in 1907. It contained a series of detailed maps of the routes between the major cities in New York with mileages and extended to other states such as Michigan and Illinois.
However, its real innovation was the inclusion of photographs illustrating turn-by-turn the precise route from New York to Albany and Saratoga and back, each turn indicated by an arrow superimposed on to the photograph. It was like a sat nav representation of a route but in paper form. Obviously, its geographic appeal was limited but it paved the way for others to consider how to represent navigational information to motorists in a more convenient form.
Twenty years later, in 1927, the Plus Four Wristlet Route Indicator picked up the gauntlet. It was a small watch-like device which held a paper scroll on which was printed a map with the route between two destinations highlighted. No batteries were required, the wearer simply turning the scroll as they drove along.
When the scroll finished and the driver had presumably arrived at their intended destination, it could be replaced with one of the other of the twenty pre-selected routes that came with the device. Other routes could be ordered as required. It allowed for no error or traffic obstruction and did not offer the comprehensive geographical range that a truly adventurous driver required but it was a start.
A variation on the same theme as the Iter Avto, launched in Italy in 1932, which also used a paper scrolling system but instead of the driver turning the scroll, the pages moved automatically as the vehicle travelled. Thought to be the first automated car-mounted navigation device, it was linked to the speedometer which regulated the pace at which the route map moved. However, it did not allow for any deviation in route, requiring the driver to stop and reload the map otherwise their position would be lost.
The blurb which accompanied the Iter Avto waxed lyrical as to its merits. “Motorists, the Iter Auto is your patron saint on Earth that will guide you by the hand showing you in your travels with impeccable accuracy, by means of a map-route carried on in perfect synchronization with the driving of your car, [showing] the way to go as well any data or information such as crossroads, bridges, bumps, level crossings, dangerous turns”, together with the locations of where to get supplies, garages, and hotels and the like and giving around three kilometres warning of the need to slow down in “the face of danger.”
Both the Wristlet Route Indicator and the Iter Avto were aimed at exclusive clientele keen to get their hands on the latest piece of motoring technology, but were not really commercially successful. They did, though, presage an age when maps would be available in a moving form, capable of indicating the optimal route between two points and what was to lie in between.
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