Things That You Might Not Know if You are Younger Than Me #2: Maps

I love maps. I think that I always have.

Here are some of my favorites.

Birdseye maps like this one of Austin used to be popular in the late 1800s.

The Gallery of Maps in the Vatican Museums is one of my favorite spots.

And of course, Middle Earth

But the maps that you are used to (like the ones on Google), those are relatively new inventions.

When I was growing up, everyone used to have huge road atlases in the trunks of their cars for road trips. Maybe some of you still have them, but I removed mine almost 20 years ago.

Major cities had zoomed in insets to show local roads.

You would have to plan out trips ahead of time and hope that there wasn't bad traffic. If there was, you could pull over, get the atlas out of your trunk, and plan a new route. I remember doing this in Tennessee once when moving Mrs. Goertz's sister down to Texas for college.

A step up from atlases was GPS devices (they weren't always in phones). GPS was originally developed for military purposes and works on a fairly simple idea: you can know exactly where you are if you know exactly when you are in relation to other things. It was made available (with limited resolution) to everyone in 1980s after an unfortunate incident where the Soviets shot down a lost commercial aircraft. GPS has slowly been improved for non-governmental uses since it is pretty much a public good (like a lighthouse). Like atlases, these weren't perfect:

They couldn't detect traffic, so you had to hope there wasn't a wreck blocking your route.
Cheaper devices couldn't receive the annual map updates and so could quickly go out of date

GPS for Dummies was my family's first device.

One more word about road navigation, I'm great at it. I might not be able to recognize faces, but I always know where I am. If I drive somewhere once, I can get there again. The only time that I'll use my maps app while driving is when I'm stuck in traffic and need to get out of it. It makes me happy that there is something that I'm good at that other people struggle with. I was driving a group of students to a beach cleanup one time. After about 2 hours, the parent chaperon asked me "Why don't you need to use GPS?" It didn't really occur to me. The beach is south; I drove south.

It's basically just 71 the whole way anyway

I could write for hours more about maps, but I guess I'll end with some of my favorite map resources:

Google Earth - this was a gamechanger when it came out. Growing up, you couldn't just see satellite images of the whole planet.
ArcGIS - GIS combines data and maps. If you like to play with maps, people will give you money to do so. Let me know if you want a free account.
Geoguessr - A fun game

Comments

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