Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks by Ken Jennings

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 Highway15,” 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 called the work of these early Richard Ankroms its “Blazed Trail” program. By 1922, a fifty-thousand-mile network of numbered, well-marked highways stretched across the country, and state and federal agencies began to follow suit with their own numbering schemes. The modern American road atlas was born, and so was its free cousin, the oil-company road map. Eight billion of these gas-station maps were printed between 1913 and 1986, the biggest promotional giveaway of the twentieth century.
    The road atlas has become inseparably tied to that uniquely American ritual of liberation: the road trip. When I think about driving a route across town, I picture the actual landmarks involved, but when I plan a trip any longer than an hour, my mental imagery is plucked straightfrom Rand McNally. In my mind’s eye, highways aren’t black striped with yellow. They’re bright blue ribbons with red borders, stretching across a landscape white with absence: literally the open road. National forests are mottled blobs constructed, if I think hard enough about it, not out of trees but out of a lime-green cerebral cortex of tiny, winding convolutions. There are trees too, of course: one evergreen apiece in every state park, right next to a little green triangular tent.
    In fact, road atlases have become such a Pavlovian bit of shorthand for travel and independence that some mapheads can satisfy their wanderlust without ever leaving home, just by opening a Rand McNally road atlas. Meet the participants in Jim Sinclair’s annual St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, a contest by mail that he’s held every February for more than forty years. They travel a circuitous course across America from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Statue of Liberty (or the reverse route in odd-numbered years) all without ever leaving their armchairs or kitchen tables. The journey is made entirely on maps.
    The Massacre (like Jim’s other yearly map events, the Circum-global Trophy Dash and the Independence Day Fireworks) was born out of the