Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Road Atlases

Episode Date: January 6, 2025

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why road atlases are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Road atlases. Known for being maps. Famous for being analog books and maps. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why road atlases are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden Katie Yes, what is your relationship to or opinion of road atlases? I? Can't use them. I don't know how to do it. I'm not a good navigator

That is not one of my strong suits I can listen to bird calls and be like that's a tit or that's a that's a black-eyed Phoebe, but give me an Atlas and I will run us off of a cliff, sort of Wile E. Coyote style. I know a lot of people are like, I was born in the wrong generation. I was absolutely born in the right generation. I need a smartphone to tell me where to go or I can't do it. I appreciate the intention of the Atlas. If you hand me one, you might as well have handed me some kind of zodiac killer code. It doesn't make any sense to me. Yeah, we're both in our 30s and I guess road navigation went from zero GPS to amazing GPS

in our lifetimes. Yeah. On family road trips as a kid, we would just use a road Atlas. I would probably pretend to help by looking at the Atlas and helping. I'm sure both my parents just figured it out first and then let me play with the Atlas, but I felt like I was helping. I actually had very little interest in maps as a kid. I know some kids are really into maps in terms of like, this is really cool. Oh yeah. I was a mapster.

My husband Brett, super into maps. I got him a book of classical maps, maps is greatest hits. But you know, I was- Before maps sold out. Yeah, before maps sold out. We went from maps to globes. Yeah, no, I mean, it's… But I mean, I think it's kind of interesting, right? I have this navigational, maybe different interests, right? Different things people focus on.

Like when I'm walking around with Brett, he's really good at navigating and I just follow him. Then when I say, oh, listen to the birds, he's like, I didn't notice the birds. I'm too busy being a human atlas. If he left me to my druthers, I would probably wind up in the middle of Switzerland and lost and confused. Nat, right. It's somehow the very top of the tallest peak for no reason. Like what? If my audio is a bit different, it's because I'm on the road. I'm actually recording from Copenhagen and I kept saying like, oh, when's our flight to Amsterdam? And he said, it's not Amsterdam, it's Copenhagen, a different country. And I was like, oh, it's essentially the same.

Anyways, let's get, enough about me, let's talk about atlases. Dutch, Danish, same thing, fact, take away number one. You know what, you know what, it starts with a D and it's both cold here. So I don't know why I'm supposed to know the difference. But yeah, atlases. Atlases. They're just very detailed. Usually what I associate with them is like driving.

You use them in order to be able to figure out where to drive. I suppose you could technically use them in order to be able to figure out where to drive. Yeah, totally. I suppose you could technically use them for hiking. Usually though for hiking, I think there's specific hiking maps. I don't know that atlases are used for that, but I presume you're going to tell me some stuff about atlases. I'm glad you bring that up because this is a very specific topic in a fun way. There are world atlases and stuff that's very specifically about road atlases, particularly for driving or for mapping all of the roads. And there's a passive about

maps in general that especially gets into Google Maps and also a guy called Mercator. Those will come up a little bit, but this stands on its own. Mercator? His name is Gerardus Mercator. Gerardus Mercator? You? He was Flemish in the 1500s. Gerardus Mercator. Gerardus Mercator. He was Flemish in the 1500s. Gerardus Mercator. From Flanders, the Low Countries. That's a good name.

Gerardus Mercator. That sounds like a Dungeons and Dragons name for the boss necromancer, Gerardus Mercator. I love it. But he just invented atlases or something. We'll get love it. But he just invented Atlas or something. We'll get into it. On the math show we talk about, he did the famous map projection that stretches out what's near the poles. So like, when you look massive, he's that. That Gerardus Mercator. Yes. I wasn't sure

which Gerardus Mercator you were talking about. I always have to clarify Gerarduses. There's so many Gerarduses. Stop naming your kids Gerardus.ator you were talking about. I always have to clarify Gerarduses. There's so many Gerarduses. Stop naming your kids Gerardus. I'm sick of it. And also a very special thank you to the listener who suggested this topic. It's Jake from Escondido. And they said, Katie will know where Escondido is. Escondido.

I know where that is. I grew up not in Escondido. I grew up in Encinitas. But I know Escondido, especially your car that is. I grew up, not in Escondido, I grew up in Encinitas, but I know Escondido, especially your car commercials because you have a lot of car sales places, place, car lots, where they sell cars. Escondido. Mine were Chicagoland and Northwest Indiana.

That was every ad. I learned that phrase, like it's deep lore or something. Yeah. Come on down to Toyota Escondido. Yeah. Thank you to Jake and also their partner, Cameron. They emailed me and sent pictures and everything because they did a cross United States road trip. Hey. Using what they call their trusty Rand McNally Road Atlas and road signs and just not using

Google Maps. That's so cool. They just wanted the experience of like an analog navigation and hopefully a little more presence and attention to where they went. That's amazing. I'm very jealous of that. That's very cool. Congratulations on doing that.

Yeah, they're very sweet email just moved me and so that's why this is the topic. I love it. So thank you, Jake from Escondido. That's like homeward bound, but without the animals. Yeah, really. It's like a, yeah, it's a journey that really fills up my heart. Yeah, I love it.

And so we're talking all about road atlases. And on every episode we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week that's in a segment called, here we count numbers on our own Counting stats on the only pod we've ever known Nice demo boards Yeah, Whitesnake. That name was submitted by Amanda L. Thank you Amanda. We have a new name for this every week

Please make it as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit through Discord or like this one to sifpodatgmail.com. This episode, we're basically going to do the present day on the 1900s and then go to the past. That's the order of stuff. So the first number this week is 1997. 1997. That is the year when the owners of Rand McNally and Company sold the business to a New York investment firm.

And that was significant because it ended 141 years of family ownership of Rand McNally. So was Rand McNally, was it two names, like two people who founded it? Yeah, William Rand and Andrew McNally. All right. In the 1800s, the mid 1800s. Until 1997. Yeah. And we'll talk about this company a lot, partly because it's big in the US and Canada, but also because it's a good example of what happened to all road endless companies.

This 1997 sale was partly driven by what was going on in technology. The next number is 1996. That's one year before 1997, Alex. Exactly right. Very good observation. Very good listening. Thank you. That's the year when a competitor of Rand McNally launched MapQuest. Oh no. MapQuest? Oh no, an internet service that plots road journeys for you. Uh oh. Oh no. Uh oh. And we'll link digitalarchaeology.org, which is a research blog about recent internet history. They have screenshots of what MapQuest looked like and was, if you want to find out what it was and you're young. Wait, I remember that. I remember we used to do that.

This is just unlocked the whole thing. We used to MapQuest it and then print it out. Yeah, I feel like everybody printed it because you didn't really have a smartphone. So people would use a browser on a desktop computer and print it out. Good God, I completely forgot about MapQuest. How did I forget about MapQuest, Alex? Time is a cruel and sadistic mistress. This is the key middle step between physical road atlases and Google Maps on a phone, is

that people use their browser to go to MapQuest and print it out the set of directions right before the journey. Right. Yeah. That's what I remember doing. Maybe even, don't put your shoes on yet, I'm printing the MapQuest that close to it. Right. I used to print out the map and then also I'd print out the step-by-step instructions.

There was a lot of pulling over to the side of the road and being like, Albuquerque? I'm not supposed to be an Albuquerque. We were also raised on Bugs Bunny, of course, and so all directional situations. So an amazing thing here is basically a Road Atlas competitor down the street from Rand McNally ended the Road Atlas business pretty much. Yeah. Rand McNally ended the Road Atlas business pretty much. Rand McNally was founded in Chicago and in the 1960s a Road Atlas competitor called R.R. Donnelly and Sons also got into that business in Chicago.

They would print Road Atlas's. As they did that, somebody at R.R. Donnelly said, let's also look into maps using the internet. And in February 1996, they launched the free MapQuest internet service. Yeah. Which was pretty much the beginning of the end. That makes sense. I mean, for idiots like me, it's very difficult to use.

So if I can print out something that tells me turn left, turn right, I don't have to think anymore. I don't have to cry anymore about how I just don't understand all the little lines and dots. So yeah, I can see that extinction events there. Yeah. And the Atlas makers did not take this laying down. The next number is 2001. That's when Rand McNally began promising customers information about construction slowdowns at Rand McNally.com. They were no longer family run. They were, was this a, who bought it?

Was it like a publicly traded company now or what was going on? It was hedge fund type people and it's been repeatedly sold to other either hedge fund type people or other businesses entirely since then. And then they started to try to use the classic name of Rand McNally, which everyone knows. This is a trusty and name. And then like try to get into this sort of technology of, hey, we can offer you something that Stupid MapQuest can't get you, which is accidents. Yeah. And something that really nobody could get you, because MapQuest didn't really handle that. And a number in the Maps show is 2005. That's when Google Maps launched at all.

And so in 2001, Rand McNally said, we have the best service because you buy our physical Atlas and then every two weeks, if not sooner, we will update a log online of all highway construction in the US, Canada, and Mexico. Right, yeah. So you can use your Atlas to plan the route and you can use our website to know if that route would be slow and if you should go a different way.

If you remember, even when Google Maps launched, did not give you real-time information. I don't remember that. I don't think it gave you accidents. In fact, there's this period of time when it started to do it, but it wasn't very good. Yeah.

There was like, it was Waze, right? Waze instruction here, there's an accident here because Google Maps is not necessarily going to give you that information. But now I think both Google and Apple Maps sort of try to do real time traffic mapping and they do it pretty, pretty well as far as I can tell. Yeah, it took a long time for Google or Apple Maps to be advanced like it is now. And so Rand McNally was like, we can compete. We can do features that they aren't doing yet.

Great. And the next number is 2003. That's when Rand McNally filed for bankruptcy. It didn't quite do it. It didn't work out. But. Yeah, they tried. And according to the Chicago Tribune, the main reason was pressure from MapQuest and

from a similar Microsoft service called MapPoint. And then since then, they've pretty much gotten out of road atlases. As of 2020, their big product is ELDs. ELD is an electronic logging device. It's for long haul truckers to total their hours of service and other important data. Yeah, because I just Googled Rand McNealy as you were talking about it, and they still have a website. And yeah, it seems like mostly it's for truckers.

So how do they assist truckers? They basically just got into different technology as their business and pivoted out of Road Atlas. It's more about making sure the trucker is not breaking laws for how many hours straight they can drive and then also managing the load in the truck, stuff like that. Right, right. It's good we have those laws. Good God.

Really good. I mean, I don't think it's probably not enough. We should do a whole episode on trucking, shouldn't we? Because it seems like that's a whole thing. Yeah, that would be cool. We should do that. We should. Trucking. Trucks. Send it away. Trucks. Twucks. I like trucks. Before we did our London show, I considered doing a topic of lorries just because that's fun British slang I didn't done. Yeah, the weasels was more fun I'm never gonna say no to a weasel

So yeah, they could have also gone to the sex sells sort of thing Right like and have rote atlases where all the maps are sexy like It's like, oh, this is an atlas, but actually when you squint, it's a sexy lady with boobies. It's that optical illusion where it's either a young woman or an old woman, but then the third thing is a map of Illinois or something. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and in general, physical maps of routes is kind of just handled by internet services now. There have been lots of businesses besides Rand McNally. There have been regional map makers like the Thomas Guide that was a big thing in Southern California. There's also auto clubs like AAA that

used to produce custom roadmaps for members in advance of a road trip. But apparently physical maps for journeys, that's more for like planes and boats now. Places where you might have less internet service. That's the people tending to do that. I think Thomas Guide is the one that I was familiar with. So that would make sense. That was mostly with. That would make sense. That was mostly California. When I was in college in upstate New York at Syracuse, they put us in touch with people in Los Angeles in case we were moving there for work. Every old person told me, you have

to have a Thomas guide in Los Angeles or you're going to be lost forever. They were simply old. I got a smartphone. Yeah. It's sweet though. It was fun. It was very nice of them, but I didn't need it. It just took up space in my tiny new car. It's just going to happen to us, Alex. We're going to be like, oh, you've got to make sure you have a smartphone in the directions so that you know where to go. And it's going to be like, man, I already uploaded the information to my brain tube

and we're also going to teleport there, so shut up, grandpa. That's 100% true. I'm gonna be like, be sure you have enough gas and they will beam to my location. Yeah. Oh my god, doy, we have evolved beyond physical realms. They have a Valley Girl accent and have evolved beyond physical realms. Yeah. Like, we're all intangible now.

Get with the program, grandpa. And so that's the basic status of Road Atlas is now and that's why our wonderful listeners could have a different experience. It's not such a thing anymore, but that only happened very recently in Your and My Lifetime that changed. Yeah, yeah, because we got robots now. So you know, a lot of changes. Robots.

And then we have a little more Rand McNally information in Takeaway Number One. Rand McNally did not invent the Road Atlas. They did survive the Great Chicago Fire and create a forerunner of Google Street View. What? It turns out atlases are kind of the least interesting thing about Rand McNally. There's two other amazing things that people don't know. So they were one of the few to survive the Great Chicago Fire. That's what we like to call in the business, suspicous.

Yeah, Mrs. O'Leary's Road Atlas caused the fire and let escape town and got out of there. All your competitor atlases, all your competitors' maps burned down, suspicous. That is kind of a plausible old-timey plan for a paper business to cutthroat, destroy their competitors, burn the entire city down. Blame it on some old lady and her cow because she's Irish. Yeah, it also turns out McNally was an Irish immigrant. So, Rhode Islanders are partly from the Irish here. So, I'm also being anti-Irish in accusing them. Right, different Irish person. Had to be Irish. For the record, I'd like to say I'm roughly half Irish with red hair, so I'm allowed to do it. Oh, yeah. I'm roughly a quarter Irish. Yeah, there we are. So we're, as a show, we're like three quarters out of two.

I'm trying to figure out how Irish the hosting composition is. It's hard to say. It's on my mom's side and it's maybe, I'm probably not exactly half. It's just, eh. Yeah, cool. But I got the red hair jeans, so I feel like I deserve something. I deserve to make fun of some dead cartographer siren. We have two amazing stories about the Rand McNally people here. Key sources are writing for a digital magazine called Design Observer, that piece by Adam Harrison Levy. Also a piece for the Paris Review by Dan Peepenbring, and a reference text that's

called the Oxford Map Companion. It's by Patricia Seed, professor of history at UC Irvine. So Rand McNally starts because of two guys. William Henry Rand was from Massachusetts. He briefly went to California in the 1849 Gold Rush and then settled in Chicago in the 1850s. And when he did that, he was mainly a printer and he picked up some work printing copies of the Chicago Daily Tribune newspaper. And in the process, he met an Irish immigrant named Andrew McNally, who was more of a cartographer but willing to work as a staff member of Rand's business. So one of them knew how to print things and the other one knew how to map things.

And then they're like, it's too bad we can't combine our relative skills. I just don't see how this would possibly, I don't know what we would do. It doesn't make any sense. That like sort of happened for years. Yeah. Because basically Rand's business with several employees, including McNally, it grows mainly because this newspaper grows. The Chicago Daily Tribune goes on to become the Chicago Tribune, the main Chicago newspaper. And then years later, 1868, Rand makes McNally

his partner in a new structure because they had been printing in addition to newspapers, railroad timetables. And then he said, I guess we could expand into maps of railways. And finally in 1872, they let McNally make some railroad maps. That's like the first time they're a map company. They were initially printing copies of somebody else's newspaper. How much did the average Joe need maps at this point, right? Yeah, very little. A lot of atlases were curiosities or academic or you'd get like a globus decoration. You didn't need printed maps that much because you weren't taking giant journeys that much

until railways really. That's the first time. It's interesting because timetables make sense because timetables are really important to know. You know where the train station is. You know where you want to go, get on a train, do that timetable. But I guess if you want to make a larger journey from point A to point B where you're making numerous changes at different train stations, having a map where you can see, all right, once I get to this place and I can change to this train station, that would actually be pretty relevant to people's needs. Totally, and you don't need a map of it.

You just say, this is where I'm staring, this is where I'm going. I don't need to know which mountains and rivers and things are between it, whatever. I just sit in the train and smoke a lot of tobacco. That's all I'm going to do. A lot of tobacco. I'll share it with my baby. Twirl my mustache and harass women who are dressed in black clothing and then become a meme many years later.

Yeah. Yeah. Like Rand McNally is mostly a newspaper printer, not even writing the newspaper, just printing copies and also- Making copies. ... printing materials for the railroads for almost half a century. That's mostly what they do. And then about 50 years later, 1924, they make their first road Atlas, which is long after other companies in other countries had been doing that for a while. Wow. So why do you think other countries started doing it first? It seems like the main reason is that the US and a couple other countries all got into cars at the same time or got into making cars at the same time.

But long distance US roads weren't as good as they were in, in particular, France and Germany. Those are the first two countries to make road atlases. That is really interesting because the US is now really the dominant car culture of, well, maybe not the world, but one of the most... USA. USA. One of the most car-centric cultures in the world. But it sounds like early on, like in France and Germany, they started making these roads a lot earlier, historically.

Yeah, and they were also smaller countries, so they could do a good road network faster. It's not our fault. They just are little countries. Yeah, we were awesomer in many ways. But really the first decade of the 1900s, a couple countries start mass producing and buying up cars really fast. My all-time favorite stat about it that's been on a few past episodes, there's a historical book called Car by Gregory Votolato. He says that in the US there were 8,000 registered cars in 1900 and 12 years later there were 1 million registered cars from 8,000 to 1 million in 12 years. And so people wanted roadmaps. But the US didn't really have an amazing interlocking set of roads for long distances that you need a road atlas for.

When was the jump to million cars? What year was that? 1912. One million registrations. My God. Yeah, that's wild. Totally changes how life feels, right? Suddenly there's these metal beasts on all the roads instead of horses. Yeah. I actually wrote, sorry to plug my own stuff on this fine podcast, but I actually wrote a summer news episode called, Do We Really Need All These Cars? Yeah, it's great.

Everyone didn't welcome the car. There was a big push by car companies. They would do propaganda parades to make fun of Jaywalkers, for instance. It was a wild time in the US, where it's like this war between people who didn't really want cars to take over, and then car manufacturers who did want cars to take over because they were selling cars. Yeah. That leads into a mini takeaway number two. The very first road atlases were made by French and German companies with a vested interest

in cars. Rand McNally is a newspaper and railway company. They don't have a vested interest in cars. And 24 years before they make a road atlas, companies in France and Germany start making them. 1900's the date for both. A French automaker called Dedion-Boton prints the first national map of French roads. I'm sorry, I believe they're pronounced D-I-O-N-P-O-V-O. Yeah, Dedion and Boton were business partners partners and they were also an early leader in making

car engines. They would sell their engines to other companies and also make cars. They apparently built the first popular gas-powered car engine in 1895, according to the Henry Ford Museum. As soon as they were making cars, they said, let's promote roads and knowing where you're going. That is a business win for us. Great.

That's exactly the same thing that was happening in the US too, once car manufacturers started to, they were like, we need to promote roads. We need to get people on board with roads for cars. So some of the earliest car designs were, there are some electric ones actually, like basically electric battery powered cars. They just didn't have the power that gas did. So they worked fairly well. They weren't terrible, but we didn't really think about like, hey, this is a finite resource and it's going to cause global warming because we were still like putting mercury up our butts. So like it's not, it wasn't a concern at the time.

Yeah. Sitting in a train car, putting mercury up your butt, tobacco in your mouth. It was just great to be alive in the late 1800s. No worries. No worries until your tongue falls off. The other big French pusher of road atlases was the Michelin Tire Company. In 1910, they innovated by making an atlas of French national roads that included landmarks. This leads to Michelin making restaurant guides and ratings and pushing tires by pushing journeys. Yeah, I love, I'm all about those Michelin, Michelin, not necessarily the Michelin starred restaurants because those are expensive, but the Michelin guide ones, sometimes affordable. Yeah, like recommended.

Thank you, tire man. Thank you for bending. Thank you. I can see you fit a lot of this food in your bulbous body. The other countries here is Germany and they might have pushed it even harder. Because Germany also from the early 1900s and through the Nazi times is famous for excellent national roads. And in-

The Autobahn. Yeah, yeah. Autobahn. In 1900, their first road Atlas comes from their first automobile club for consumers. It was so new, it was just called the Automobile Club. They made a national map of German roads. And then the big car company behind it was Mercedes-Benz. They were just a company very early in car history. By 1909, Mercedes-Benz had sponsored road atlases of Germany, Switzerland, Austria,

Czechoslovakia, and Northern Italy. You want to know what automobile club is in German, Alex, according to Google Translate? Are you ready for this? Is it almost the English version? Is it funny? Hang on one second. Let me clear my throat. Automobile club.

Right. So just the same words in whatever accent you choose. Yeah. Cool. Right. So just the same words in whatever accent you choose. Yeah. Cool. Cool. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And Germany also innovated in a way that you would think Rand McNally would have thought too. A publisher named Wilhelm Karl Koch, he made railway maps as early as 1897. And then in 1901, he started making railway maps that also include the roads. Because like, yeah, that makes sense. But Rand McNally just didn't think of it for a long time. So oh well.

I guess it kind of makes sense if there's not as much, like if the US is a little bit behind Germany in terms of their road development and car development. Yeah. And yeah, the other thing is like the first thing approaching road atlases in the United States was regional road maps produced for free by oil companies. And the oil companies operated gas stations and put them for free in the gas stations. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, no such thing as a free lunch atlas, Alex. Follow the money. The Paris Review says it was specifically so oil companies could get you to use their gasoline by making you like the directions you got after you bought your first tank. Yeah. And if people have heard the long ago Interstate Highway System episode of CIF about the US Interstate System, that becomes official in the 1950s but only starts to be created in the 1920s. There start to be governing organizations trying to interlink all our

roads together. And in 1924, Rand McNally makes their first Atlas of those roads. Also, it was not called a road Atlas. It was branded as the Rand McNally AutoChum, which is so sweet, but weird. Oh my God. We could have had AutoChums. Oh, man. I wish we called them AutoChums. That's so cyberpunk too. Like, AutoChum, that just sounds like a cyberpunky thing. A car you talk to. It feels like there are these turning points in history where we could have had a much cooler future.

Going from Road Atlas to AutoChum, vice versa, straying away from AutoChum is what got us into the less good timeline, I'm convinced. Yeah, it's a very friendly vibe. It's like your car will make jokes with you and have tea with you. Yeah. I want that in a car. So, Rand McNally basically became the leading Road Atlas maker because they were just large when they finally got around to doing Road Atlases.

They weren't a leader at all. But there's two ways they were an amazing leader. One is that they were a leader in surviving the Great Chicago Fire as a business. I mean, good job, guys. Good job. Rand brings McNally in as his partner in 1868. Then in 1871, Chicago burns down. We've talked about before a giant fire leaves about a third of the city population homeless

within 36 hours. Just third of the city population homeless within 36 hours, just ravages the city. But the people, Rand and McNally, resumed printing just three days after the fire. And allegedly it's because they buried some of their machines in the beach of Lake Michigan. Oh, whoa. Why would they? Was that just for funsies? Or did they do that because there was a fire? Why did they bury their machines? Because of the fire, yeah. The company lore is that once the fire breaks out, Rand takes two of their key printing machines, puts that in a big wagon, brings the wagon to McNally's house, and then the two of them speed to the

shores of Lake Michigan, personally, sweatily dig giant holes in the beach sand and put the machines in that because then they'll be protected from the fire. They're basically underground. That's wild though because couldn't you just go somewhere where there's not the fire or was it just so big they didn't know where the fire was going to end? Yeah, you would think they'd just go somewhere else and this story is kind of a legend. It might not be completely true, but one way or another, they were up and running. Because there's a lot of sand that get in there. Because I don't know a lot. Look, I'm

not a printing machine expert, but I personally, I feel like if I had a printing machine, I wouldn't want to get sand in it. I'm just saying, coicinally, coicinally, wouldn't want to get sand in it. That accent makes me think you know 1870s culture though, so I trust it. Yeah. Yeah, it does feel a little bit legendary. They could have just gone to outside of Chicago. But in the legend, they personally buried it in the sand of Lake Michigan, and that's cool. But the thing we know is either way, they were up and running right away. And then they buried each other. They buried each other just for fun. Wee hee hee. Yeah.

Put little shells on each other. She's like, look, you're a mermaid. They're just having this childlike great time, and the entire city is blazing behind them. Screams and fire, yeah. That's one amazing thing about them. The other thing is that they invented turn-by-turn photographical directions for a road trip. Whoa, that's interesting. Long before Google Street View or something. So you'd have like a flip book essentially of the photos of where you're supposed to

be going? Yes. That's awesome. And the genesis of it is 1907, right? Like very early for this. That's quite early, yeah. And again, this was like family owned for a long time. So Andrew Rand McNally II,

who's a descendant to one of them and named after the other in his honor. Oh, well, all right. He's their grandson. And in 1907, this guy is going to take his honeymoon. And it's a funny destination to me. He wants to go to Milwaukee. It's a funny destination to me. He wants to go to Milwaukee. Come on, don't be so mean to Milwaukee. Let Milwaukee have this one. Someone wanted to go there voluntarily. Let them have that.

It's a great city. So Andrew Rand McNally II wants to honeymoon in Milwaukee, which means driving from Chicago to Milwaukee. And he immediately realized this is going to be horrible because most of the roads are unpaved or impassable. You have to constantly ask locals for directions. It's extraordinarily difficult to drive even that relatively short distance in the United States in 1907. Hey, interesting. So he experiences like this sucks. I can make this easier for others by making little photography books. Also, I wouldn't stop for directions and that causes a big argument with my wife.

And so I want to make sure no man ever again has to stop for directions. I do like the idea that their company can do road atlases because they're the only man capable of asking for directions in the United States. That would be a funny company, Lord. Is that old gender trope finally dying that men don't ask for directions? Because now it seems largely irrelevant. I'll bet that's going to go away. I wouldn't know. Zoomers.

Zoomers tell us if that's going to go away. I wouldn't know. Zoomers. In our Discord. Zoomers. Zoomers tell us if that's alien to you. Pipe up in the Discord. Sound off? No. No cap. No cap in our Discord. No cap? Cap or no cap? Yeah. Is it a gender trope that men don't stop and ask for directions? We're not talking about one direction. That's not even Zoomers. What am I doing? It's like millennials. Exactly. Yeah.

And so not only does Andrew Rand McNally seconds say, hey, we could do this, he makes the first one on his honeymoon trip. He straps a photo camera to his car. He stops and takes a new photo every time they reach a junction or an intersection or another decision point going both ways. Oh my god. His poor wife is like, his poor wife is like, Please, Rand, come make love to me, dear.

And he's like, I've got to tape a camera to our car and make sure the angles are good and have something so I can press the button while I'm driving. And's like, please dear, I'm in that lingerie you bought me. Shut up woman. Yeah, so he's taking photos of every intersection in like Kenosha and Antioch, Illinois, all these like random towns. When he gets back to Chicago, he adds written information to caption the photos and creates a turn by turn photographic guide for how to caption the photos and creates a turn-by-turn photographic

guide for how to drive between Chicago and Milwaukee in either direction. Wow. And they named this a photo auto map. Not a photo buddy? Should have been PhotoChem. PhotoChem would be amazing. And they really go all out on this. By 1912, they had published 25 guides to different routes between US cities,

everything from Chicago to Rockford to New York to Albany, turn by turn photo directions. And that's also part of why they were slow to make road atlases. People can buy an individual guide for individual journeys. Yeah, that's very cool. I feel like that's maybe even a step up from MapQuest. I don't remember us having that capability with MapQuest when that came around. That was mostly just written directions of where to turn and then an actual map. The only reason it's not better is the photos would be out of date, but otherwise that 1907 guide is better than MapQuest.

Although you have to flip through the photos as you're driving and so you have to have someone do that and it's probably your wife who's mad at you for ignoring her during your honeymoon. That's right. Yeah. Every man in America wouldn't ask for directions and was logging photographs of their trip. Those are the two male behaviors. Yeah.

Next photo, honey. Yeah, that's the astounding lore around these modern road atlases for car culture. We're going to take a quick break and then return with a couple takeaways about the origin of Road Atlas' before cars. Hey, Sydney, you're a physician and the co-host of Sawbones, a marital tour of misguided medicine, right? That's true, Justin. Is it true that our Medical History podcast is just as good as a visit to your primary care position? No, Justin, that is absolutely not true.

However, our podcast is funny and interesting and a great way to learn about the medical misdeeds of the past, as well as some current not so legit health care fads. So you're saying that by listening to our podcast, people will feel better. Sure. And isn't that the same reason that you go to the doctor?

Well, you could say that. And our podcast is free? Yes, it is free. You heard it here first folks, Sawbones, Merrell Ture, of Misguided Medicine, right here on Maximum Fun, just as good as going to the doctor. No, no, no. Still not just as good as going to the doctor, but pretty good. It's up there.

It's hard to explain what happens on Jordan Jesse Go. So I had my kids do it. Saying swear words. Saying swear words. Yeah. Bad jokes. Bad jokes? Bad jokes.

Maybe it's like you tell people that you're gonna interview them and then you just stay there like really quiet and try and creep them out. It's just really boring. Because of Jordan, right? Not me. Because of both of you.

Oh. Subscribe to Jordan Jesse Goh, a comedy show for grownups. And we're back. And let's go back with takeaway number three. The Mercator map projection guy also coined the name Atlas for an Italian publishing fad. Okay. I didn't parse that sentence. Say it again. Yeah. Yeah. We mentioned Gerardus Mercator at the very beginning of the show. He's the guy who stretched out the world map so things by the poles look too big and Africa looks too small. He also coined the name Atlas for giant books of maps, which started

out as a publishing fad in Italy. So Gerardus Mercator, what's his nationality again? He's from Flanders. He's Flemish. Flanders, Flemish. Flanders is the Belgium and sort of Netherlands area of Europe. Gerardus Mercator. I can't stop saying that name. It's a very good name. It just sounds like a wizard's name and I love it. Gerardus Mercator. I assume it's from Atlas as in that character, what, Roman guy, Roman character holding up the world. Greek mythology and Roman too. Yeah, yeah. Mercator pulled the name of this mythological Titan partly to just express how important of a map book Gerardus Mercator had made. He simply called his map book Mercator's Atlas. It's one of those simple, straightforward epic names

that says, I have done it. This is the iconic work of all works. Yeah. We could have been going around driving, trying to follow a Mercator. Right. He could have just made himself the feature of it. It could have been auto chumps instead. I don't know. There were a lot of forking paths here and we ended up with a Greek mythological Titan for a book with pictures of interstate highways. It's kind of weird when you stop and think. My personal favorite book, I can't say that without laughing, Atlas Shrugged. My favorite book of all time. You really didn't get far in that.

I was trying to do it. I thought maybe I could do it deadpan enough that Alex thought I was serious, but it didn't work. I do like the idea of Atlas Shrugged being about a lost dad. I'm not asking. Just keep driving to Nevada. Yeah. Yeah. Like it's about, the ultimate libertarianism is that no man ever should ask for directions or give another man directions. That's 99% true.

Anyway. You must pull yourself up by your own direction strap. Yeah. So two key sources here. It's a book called On the Map by journalist and nonfiction author Simon Garfield and another book called The Atlas of Atlases by nonfiction writer Philip Parker. These are both amazing books about maps. And on the past CIF episode about maps, we talk about Gerardus Mercator not being much

of a map publisher. He was more of a dabbler in being an educator or a printer in all sorts of duchies and small kingdoms in 1500s Europe. The projection that he made was one of the few times he ever published a map and he partly stretched it out because he was not a professional cartographer. It's a bad idea. On top of all that, then he said, now that I'm doing a little map making, I want to make a bunch of money in the latest publishing trends. In the early 1500s, people start printing

sets of maps of places. And in Venice in the 1560s, there's what we now call an Atlas fad. They hadn't invented Atlas as the name for it yet, but there were entire shops of pages of maps. You would pick your favorite maps out of the options and then the shop bound it for you. Oh, that's so cool. The interesting thing about Italy is there's a lot of, I think people really enjoy these older shops and like these weird, very niche artisanal shops where they just do very old school stuff. So I do think there's a shop in Turin where it's not maps, but you can go and you pick

out paper and they'll bind a book for you, just like a blank book. There's another thing where they'll bind stuff for you. There are actual book binders still, which is wild. Still, wow. So yeah. And then also just like, there are so many old prints of maps and stuff that people, I guess people, they were super popular at the time. Now you kind of see them being sold in antique stores or at these sort of flea markets.

Just a lot of old maps. That makes sense, yeah. And Venice does this in the 1560s, Rome in the 1570s, northern and central Italy start having shops for buying the maps of places you want to have maps of or maps by your favorite cartographers. People had specific people they thought were better than others. Ooh, cartographers had groupies? That's great. Yes. And then Mercator says, I'm going to dominate this business. I'm going to make one super book that has more of a complete mapping of the world and

understanding of the world than anybody else. And from a quality perspective, he does not succeed, but he does kind of win the business. From a quality perspective, leave something to be desired. Yeah, this takes so long, it isn't published until shortly after his death in 1595. But it is a giant five volume compendium of 107 maps, a set of Latin poetry, a 36,000 word treatise about the biblical creation of earth. Sorry, this is so weird. What a weird collection of stuff.

I was like almost still on board with the Roman poetry and then now we get to what's happening. Yeah, his thinking is like other atlases don't also include the Bible. He's like, this is going to be the most complete book about the earth that's ever been made. Okay. You're right. He's absolutely right. Other atlases don't have the entire Bible in it. Yeah. Unfortunately, the maps had stuff like a landmass called Friesland, west of Iceland, that does not exist. There were a lot of errors and he's just bad at map making.

Well, do we know it doesn't exist? Have you been there? It's true. I have not been to the made up place Friesland. Then how do you know it doesn't exist? Prove me wrong. And he calls this Mercator's Atlas and his message is, you know that Titan who was punished by Zeus to carry the earth and the heavens on his shoulders? This is like on the scale of the achievement of the mythological Titan. That's what I've done.

He's saying, I've punished myself because I'm a pervert. I'm apse pervert. Perverter, am I right? That's what his bullies said, probably. In versions of the Atlas mythology, some people also thought he was the king of a mountain range in modern day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia. We still call that the Atlas Mountains. In some myths, Atlas was the first geographer. So Mercator was saying, like, my map book is so good, it deserves

to be called Atlas. Right. And then other people borrowed that naming convention for their giant map books after that. I see. Yeah. Yeah, I think there's a lot of different myths about Atlas. One of them, he's not forced to hold up the earth. He just holds up the earth and the heavens because he feels like it. Right. Yeah, this really varied, especially because it was just such an old weird story. Yeah. Yeah. That's why a map of the highway you're taking to Disney World, that's in a book named after the Greek Titan. Makes sense. Yeah.

And another historical thing here is our last takeaway number four. The first National Road Atlas was made long before cars by a Scottish lottery winner. Oh, was his name, was his name McLucky? I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. That's his crazy anime nickname. Yeah. Yeah, this is a guy named John Ogilby. He made a road Atlas of England and Scotland and Wales in 1675. This is a debatable credit for like first national road atlas, but it's really the first

atlas specifically focused on roads in that modern sense. There were lots of other geographical atlases before and after that. Okay. So this one was like the first one where it's like you get on your, at this point, what was it like, cart? And then you were just the back of a horse, yeah. Or a horse right on that horse's back like a horse pervert. And then you get on the road and you follow this guy's maps so that you don't get lost. So what you said he was a lottery winner. Was

that an influence in his creating Road Atlas? Yeah. He basically had a really lucky and strange life and much like Mercator, kind of fell into cartography late in life as a business venture. So, he's another guy who innovated maps by just being a wheeling and dealing business person. That's okay. His main business ventures were printing and also producing plays, like putting on dramatic productions. Wow.

Which was huge money in the 1500s and the 1600s. Yeah. Man, that was the era. You could put on a play about some guy killing some other guy, and then you'd get paid a bunch of money. And then if you got bored with that, you could draw a little map and then give it to people and they'd ride their horses on it. And then you would also die of smallpox and also syphilis. Yeah, it's tough and great. Ogilby is born into poverty in Scotland. His father's thrown into debtor's prison and the family probably would have run out of food and starved except that very young John Ogilby purchases a winning lottery ticket. That was the difference making thing.

They had lotteries at the time. Can you remind me the date that we're talking about? Early to mid 1600s, that happens. Okay. So they had like lotteries. That's wild. Yeah. And a lot of these would just be kind of random run by a business person or community. It wasn't like Powerball. But when he wins the lottery, he has enough capital to free his father and also to open a school for dancing. Ogobe teaches dance. And then he tutors the children of nobles in all sorts of subjects just by kind of bluffing into it. That's fantastic. He's just lying.

There's like three more weird moves here too, because by tutoring the children of nobles, he also gladhands the nobles. He ends up becoming a key advisor to the British Lord that gets put in charge of dominating Ireland, like colonial Ireland. And then with that guy's help, he opens a royal theater in Dublin and becomes a theater impresario. My gosh. Producing plays and making tons of money. This is like if the music man involved anti-Irish genocide. The next step is the English Civil War happens.

Folks don't need to know all the details of it, but in general, the king is executed, the Lord Ogilby works for is executed, Ireland rebels, Ogilby tries to flee Ireland and almost dies in a shipwreck. Well, did he? And then he's like, if I had a map, maybe the ship wouldn't overact. I wish that was the result. But Ogilby survives but loses his entire fortune, both due to some of it being on the boat and also the chaos of the Civil War.

And then he wins another lottery. And he responds to that by teaching himself Latin, teaching himself Greek, and like bootstrapping a publishing business to print classical literature, which was probably pretty poorly printed because he just learned Latin and Greek like yesterday. So it's kind of a discount fly by night publishing business. Is they, is they, inted pay, I bay, e bay. Ogil bay. It almost sounds like pig Latin. Anyway. And then he kind of waits out the English Civil War because the upshot of

that is that the monarchy returns later. And the new King Charles II hires Ogilby as his royal cosmographer, basically just because Ogilby is charismatic. He's not particularly good at astronomy or cartography or anything. Oh, that Ogilby, he can sure tell a raunchy joke. Why don't you be my cosmographer? Alex, what's a cosmographer? It's kind of an old timey mix of astronomy and cartography. Okay. Understand where everything is on Earth and the universe.

People just kind of bluff their way through saying they knew how to do that. You know, it seems like a, that seems ripe for the bluffing because he's going to fact check you. You're like, this is where Neptune is and this is a star called Gleap Glorp. Right, right. We had discovered the Americas at that point and you just need to confidently say what it looks like without really knowing. That kind of thing. Yeah.

Yeah, you know, kind of a weird blob with a wiener looking thing on one end of it. Ogilby, once he has this like cushy job as a royal cosmographer, he makes a pretty good road atlas of the entire island of Britain, which is England and Scotland and Wales. It's not the separate Ireland over there. And he's like weirdly committed to making this good, even though he's been kind of bluffing his whole life. So no cap. He does a good Atlas of England.

Yeah. He makes a journey of 26,000 miles, which is nearly 42,000 kilometers, all up and down every road he can go down in the island of Britain. Personally viewing everything, he's mapping and recording. He publishes this amazing book of these maps in 1675. It's simply called Britannia, because it's kind of like Mercator. You just see the most epic and short title you can do, because you really are, this is the best. Right. It's specifically the first road atlas because for one thing,

the routes are printed with a consistent scale of distance. They did a standard ratio of one inch of map is one mile of road, which was kind of new. Nobody was that good at distances yet in mapping. That's actually quite impressive he was able to do that. It's just like in the Music Man, how at first he's not good at cartography and he tricks everyone in Iowa that he's good at it. And then he gets shipwrecked and then he actually learns how to do it. Now I'm just thinking about journeys I've taken at Iowa. I like it.

We'll get you to Iowa City and to Sioux City. And he's just showing you map west. And Ogilby also really boils the map down to just roads. There was some decoration, but he didn't really bother with geography or things of note. The map was drawn not like the road atlas we have now. It was a set of vertical strips of road. So it was independent of geography and even cardinal directions, and each page would be one major route,

and it just shows the roadways and the stops. And then you can cross-reference other pages if you need a different journey than one of the pages. That kind of makes sense, right? Because you go along the road, and it's almost like scrolling on your phone, except it's paper. Really? Yeah. It's more devoted to roads than any previous Atlas. Atlas had only been around

for about 100 years in the Italian way. This Scottish guy figured out a way to do it extremely specifically for road journeys and road distances. Yeah. I'm going to be honest with you, this looks easier to follow than the Thomas Guide for me. Kind of me too. Like it's really boiled down. It's really just, I'm going from London to Portsmouth or I'm going from London to Edinburgh. And so you just do that. And this was highly influential. It sparked a genre of British road atlases. In 1720, a cartographer published one simply called Britannia Depicta or Ogilby Improved. Wow.

That's pretty ballsy to be like Ogilby Improved. Yeah. And he had died by then, so you could get away with it. I see. I see. Now I'm going to do an Atlas that's called Thomas Guide if it didn't suck. Yeah, and Britain becomes a leader in road atlases long before cars, and they're pretty much not the first to do them for cars because their railways were so good, and also they were somewhat slow to build excellent highways across the island of Britain. So that's like yet another weird

chapter of road Atlas history is the pre-car one. Yeah, that's wild. Yeah, because I guess you still need to use roads even if you don't have a car. I mean, like here in Copenhagen, it seems like everyone uses a bicycle. Yeah, and apparently some bicyclists were also excited about Road Atlases once that got going for cars. It wasn't like pushed for bicycles in the few decades before mass production of cars. But yeah, there have been journeys for a long time and people want this stuff. Yeah, yeah, I get it. I too like to go from point A to point B and get really actually get to point B instead of getting sidetracked into another Flying Tiger, Copenhagen.

Is that, that's a store, right? Flying Tiger, Copenhagen. That's a store, right? Flying Tiger? I've seen them everywhere. I don't know what's going on. It's the Claire's phenomenon. You know how there used to be Claire's everywhere? You know what I'm talking about, right? Claire's is the Rand McNally of stores where you get earrings, for sure. It was such a thing.

And then then nope. It's like an earring store for preteens and stuff. And you could go and get your first ear piercings there and then a major cool infection. Anyways, what we were talking about. The past, essentially. Yeah. We're really in the first decade or two of people not wanting a bunch of physical maps on hands at all times for journeys, because we have the internet in the air around us. Do you think it'll ever change? Is there going to be a point at which... Well, the listeners who gave you the idea for this

episode, they did want to use physical maps. So, is there going to kind of be a desire to return to physical maps because we're all tired of doing things that robots tell us to do? I think it really makes sense as an activity and as a way of kind of winning back your own attention. Because I've even, I've had like my phone on a little holder, hands-free for directions, but then like text will pop up at the top of it and I get distracted from the road,

you know? I'd rather not have that happen. So. Yeah. I could see it. Everything from vinyl records to physical books to, well, Road Atlas is the third example, I guess. Yeah. There's an opportunity for that.

Yeah, makes sense. So thanks again, Jake from Escondido. Yeah, Jake, come on down to Jake's from Escondido for Cars, Cars, Cars, Cars. Folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, Rand McNally did not invent the Road Atlas. They did survive the Great Chicago Fire and create a forerunner of Google Street View. Takeaway number two, the first modern Road Atlases were made by French and German

companies with a vested interest in cars. Takeaway number three, Gerardus Mercator, the Mercator map projection guy, coined the name Atlas for an Italian publishing fad. Takeaway number four, the first national road Atlas was made by a Scottish lottery winner. And then a set of numbers, especially about the progression of Road Atlas's becoming not cutting-edge technology and also when they started being cutting-edge technology. Those are the takeaways. Also I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason that this podcast exists. So members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously this show at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason that this podcast exists, so

members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is how Road Atlas publishers helped create highway numbers including a US route 666. Visit sifpod.fund for that bonus show, for a library of almost 19 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of max fun bonus shows. It's special audio, it's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Also thank you to a few folks who sent me nice notes about this early 2025 time because they really enjoyed last week's bonus

release of an entire live CIF episode about weasels. We made that part of the bonus feed because people paid ticket prices to see that in London and also we wanted to share it. So I'm glad folks enjoyed the talk about mustelids, aka weasels. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include a lot of books about the history and amazing features of maps. There's the book On the Map by journalist and nonfiction author Simon Garfield.

He's also written a whole other amazing book about typefaces that we've cited before. Another book for this week is The Atlas of Atlases by nonfiction writer Philip Parker. The Oxford Map Companion by Patricia Seed, professor of history at UC Irvine. Another amazing source this week is the digital magazine Design Observer. They have pictures of the photo automaps created long ago by Rand McNally. And on top of many digital resources, I'm linking two past CIF episodes for you. One is about maps in general. The other is about the interstate highway system in the US.

Those are just additional amazing episodes about this kind of topic if you want to go deeper. That links page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wapinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skatigok people, and others. Also, Katie taped this while traveling in the country of Denmark, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free CIF discord where we're sharing

stories and resources about native people and life. There's a link in this episode's description to join the discord. We're also talking about this episode on the discord and hey, would you like a tip on another episode because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 155 that's about the topic of ice cream. Fun fact there, at least 30% of ice cream is just air and companies put that in to make the ice cream taste good.

So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my cohost Katie Goldin's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken, Unhaven by the BUDOS band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping supports. Extra extra special thanks go to our members.

Thank you to all our listeners. And to reiterate what we said last week as a little holiday message, I'm just so overjoyed that every one of you is out here making this show a thing that exists. It is an absolute sunbeam in my life and I hope it is in yours too. We're really glad to be here in 2025, keeping on doing it. And I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.