In many modern cars, it is enough to say “I want to …”, so that the navigator is activated and leads us to the desired place. But in this article, the GPS does not take us to a city, to a street, but to its own history.
The classics like maps, those big maps that not everyone knows how to fold, and they look suspiciously at navigators. But these too have their story to tell, a story that almost starts with that of the car itself, although many think it is an invention of the digital age.
We are in 1909, the North American JW Jones creates the Jones Live Map. This device, connected to the car’s odometer, contained a series of paper discs containing radially encoded information about a route between two points. The driver chose the track with the route to follow that he had in his starting position, with the one corresponding to 180º of the circumference. The movement of the speedometer activated the gears of the Live Map which, clockwise, showed the data on the disk. Each disc covered 100 miles and the information included road type, position and directions of rotation. The invention would be well received, but the rapid emergence of new roads made updating the map discs unfeasible. So the invention lost interest and fell into oblivion.
Another chapter in this story is the Italian Iter Avto, from the 1930s. Installed on the dashboard, it contained a set of rolled up paper charts and a cable connected to the speedometer controlled the internal mechanism that causes them to be displayed in a small window. displayed . The situation appeared to be proportional to the walking speed. But you had to reload the maps when they ran out and pinpoint the exact location when the driver deviated from the route.
Also Spaniards who were interested in this idea of navigation. In this case we are talking about Antonio Martín Santos from Leon who created the Auto Map in 1954. It had a similar function to that of the Iter Avto, but with the special feature that it was portable and that the progress of the route meters could be stopped by a driver. The system, patented in eleven European countries, won the gold medal at the VI International Exhibition of Inventors in Brussels (1957). Several car brands were interested in the idea, but the sudden death of the inventor in 1961 pushed the Auto Map into oblivion.
At the 1964 Detroit Motor Show, Ford introduced the prototype Aurora Concept. This model, which advanced the car of the future according to the concepts of the time, included a navigator on the dashboard, a combined and improved evolution of the Inter Avto and Auto Map, which had a pointer indicating the position on the map. It didn’t go on sale.
Honda released in 1981 what can be considered the first navigator in the history of the automotive industry. Dubbed the Electro Gyrocator, it consisted of an electronic compass and a helium gas sensor associated with a gyroscope that detected changes in the car’s trajectory. Distance calculations were performed by a mechanism coupled to the transmission. All information was analyzed by a computer that placed the vehicle on the microfilmed maps displayed on a screen. An electronic pointer marked the location.
In 1985 the Etak Navigator appears. Developed in California, it was essentially a portable computer with a vector-based CRT monitor, similar to those found in oscilloscopes. The storage of the cards on magnetic media was very limited: the tapes could store a maximum of 3.5 MB of data. The creators captured the centered point of view of the car on the map, a principle that today’s GPS upholds. It was a popular accessory at the time.
In 1987, the Toyota Royal Crown integrated two keys into navigation technology: CD-ROMs as a mass data storage system and the first monitor with color screen.
In the early 1990s, geographic information systems for computers such as Mapinfo or Autodesk are no longer solely for military and research use. In a context of digital revolution, Mazda (in the Cosmos sedan) introduced the first real-time satellite triangulation car navigation system, Eunos Cosmos Navigation.
America would give its answer to the Japanese. In 1992, General Motor integrated an integrated GPS navigation system into its Onis model for the Avis rental car fleet in Florida. Three years later, it was offered as an option on Oldsmobile 88. More commonly on the GM network, it took the GuidaStar name, initially depicting California and Las Vegas.
In 1997, the Japanese firm Alpine, which had collaborated with Honda, released the first portable navigation equipment, the CVA-1005, based on satellite positioning (GPS). And in 1998 the North American Garmin presents the Early Garmin StreetPilot. Because the US government did not release the full potential of the GPS system for civilian use until 2000, the StreetPilot’s functionality was not complete. But the device, with a black and white screen, represented a huge advance because of its compact and functional size and memory capacity.
Since then, GPS navigation technology has evolved a lot. Until 2005, work was carried out on the digitization of paper road maps, which were quickly obsolete due to changes in the infrastructure. From there, the work of OpenstreetMap and DigitalGlobe, the cradle of Google Maps, have laid the foundation for any user to find the shortest route. In successive years, NavTeq and Tele Atlas, provider of maps for Google Maps, would stand out in cartographic digitization.
The standardization of smartphones, around 2007, marks the next step. Automotive devices and web browsers converge in the path of geolocation, unifying databases and increasing the flow of information and data in real time.
You see, the browser has a longer history than many can imagine.
Source: La Verdad
I am Ida Scott, a journalist and content author with a passion for uncovering the truth. I have been writing professionally for Today Times Live since 2020 and specialize in political news. My career began when I was just 17; I had already developed a knack for research and an eye for detail which made me stand out from my peers.
