Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [84]
Coming from a country where mapmakers tend to exclude any landscape feature smaller than, say, Pike’s Peak, I am constantly impressed by the richness of detail 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 distinguish 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 cataracts 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 generations 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 territories mapped—Weimar-era maps that emphasized all the territory Germany lost in the 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.
Rand McNally dove into the automobile navigation business in 1907, but not with maps. Instead it acquired a competitor’s line of “Photo-Auto Guides,” which displayed a driver’s-eye view of landmarks and intersections along popular routes, just like a roadgeek’s dashboard photos. Arrows overlaid on the road showed drivers exactly where to turn, anticipating Google’s popular Street View tool by almost one hundred years. The Chicago-to-Milwaukee 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 books were a practicality, not a novelty, back then; in fact, they were more useful than maps. That’s because there was 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 Highway 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 mountain would have to come to McNally. Instead of figuring out better ways of drawing America’s messy tangle of roads on a map, Brink thought, the company should unilaterally designate a system of routes across the country and choose symbols and numbers for them. Then Rand McNally teams would drive across the country, relabeling every single route by painting colored stripes and highway logos on telephone poles, like Indian scouts marking pioneer trails across the Old West. In fact, Rand McNally