Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
on the Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 series. They include every wrinkle and divot
of the landscape, every barn, milestone, wind pump and tumulus. They distin-
guish between sand pits and gravel pits and between power lines strung from
pylons and power lines strung from poles. This one even included the stone seat
on which I sat now. It astounds me to be able to look at a map and know to the
square meter where my buttocks are deployed.
The immensity of the New World landscape, with its postcard-ready canyons and catar-
acts and mesas, has bred a different kind of map love. Not all of its footpaths have been
thoroughly trod by centuries of apple-cheeked old men with plus fours and walking sticks.
There's still the illusion, at least, that there's too much to see, that the land dwarfs our
puny attempts at cataloguing it. You can see that difference when you compare American
road maps with, say, Michelin maps of Europe, which are still full of beautiful details that
drivers couldn't care less about: relief lines, railroads, hiking trails, forests, wetlands. The
difference is one of heritage. British and European road maps are descended from gener-
ations of topographical walking and cycling maps. Americans, on the other hand, adopted
road atlases only after they'd adopted the automobile—which was quickly. Because of the
vastness of the distances to be covered, cars suited us to a (Model) T.
In fact, our roads changed to suit the maps, not the other way around. Map historians
love to claim that the decisions of cartographers can have drastic real-life effects on the
territoriesmapped—
Weimar-eramaps
thatemphasizedalltheterritoryGermanylostinthe
Treaty of Versailles may have led to Hitler's rise to power and the Second World War, for
example—but the tangled feedback of cause and effect in such cases makes it hard to point
to a single smoking-gun map. Not so in the case of the American highway system as we
know it, which was largely dreamed up in one fell swoop by Rand McNally & Co.
RandMcNallydoveintotheautomobilenavigationbusinessin1907,butnotwithmaps.
Insteaditacquiredacompetitor'slineof“Photo-AutoGuides,”whichdisplayedadriver's-
eye view of landmarks and intersections along popular routes, just like a roadgeek's dash-
board photos. Arrows overlaid on the road showed drivers exactly where to turn, anticipat-
ing Google's popular Street View tool by almost one hundred years. The Chicago-to-Mil-
waukee photos were actually taken from the front of Andrew McNally II's Packard,
as he
and his new bride
drove north for their honeymoon. These photo topics were a practicality,
notanovelty,backthen;infact,theyweremoreusefulthanmaps.That'sbecausetherewas
still no consistent, widely used system identifying American roads. Rand McNally had to
tell drivers “Turn left at the red barn” instead of “Turn left at Highway 15,” because High-
way 15 probably wasn't numbered and it certainly wasn't marked.
*
The map firm held an in-house contest seeking a solution to the mapping problem, and a
draftsman named John Garrett Brink proposed
a jaw-droppingly bold
solution: the moun-
tain would have to come to McNally. Instead of figuring out better ways of drawing Amer-
