There are so many of these examples that one has to wonder at which point drivers will stop entrusting their lives to the moving maps and start driving with their brains again. Is it when a journey that normally takes forty-five minutes through the back route starts taking an hour? Is it when a person who wants to go to New Haven, Connecticut, sets off in an undemanding way towards New Haven, Indiana? Or is it when we have grown tired of clogging up small villages with heavy goods vehicles and demand to be directed onto the path of an oncoming train?
When sat nav fails, episode 97: Robert Ziegler’s van, guided up a Swiss mountain goat track.
Sat nav is military software for dummies. You turn it on, enter a postcode and it tells you, in certain words, precisely how to get there turn-by-turn. It takes both the fun and the anguish out of driving, and the challenge and rewards out of maps. The little box lets us forget just how big maps can (and, perhaps, ought to) be. Out on a hike, a simple GPS handheld has already begun to obliterate the pleasure and the exasperation of the massive windblown Ordnance Survey sheet, and the sat nav has done away with the large spiral-bound road atlas or A-Z. But at the same time, it can be harder for our brains to process the information. A large sheet map offers a perfect way to register where we have come from, where we are going, how we get there.
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Satellite navigation as we understand it began in 1960 as an improved method of guiding intercontinental ballistic missiles. The project, officially called NAVSTAR, remained exclusively within the US Department of Defense* until the 1970s, when it was partially opened up to civilian use. Locational accuracy remained vague (to about 25 metres) until 2000, when Bill Clinton declared that since the Cold War was over it was high time for the last military restrictions to be lifted from GPS, and the modern era of electronic mapping began.
The way it worked was ingenious and insanely complicated, but at its core there was still a system of old-fashioned triangulation. A minimum of 18 orbiting satellites are required to cover the whole earth, although as many as 32 may be operational. The satellites beam their positions at precisely the same time via radio signals and electronic code, with each end user – be it rambler, pilot or driver – receiving the information via their (increasingly small) box of reckoning electronics. Several ground stations (in Hawaii, Ascension Island and elsewhere) receive the codes, and remotely monitor the satellites’ health and accuracy.
The classic and simplest way of explaining the principles of GPS involves imagining yourself floating in a room at zero gravity. You measure your distance to the closest wall with a tape measure, then another wall the same way, and then your distance from the ground. You can calculate your position in relation to the fixed walls, floor and ceiling. The orbiting satellites and the GPS receiver are essentially a larger version of this, with radio signals taking the place of the tape measure.
The non-military concept of satellite navigation first became popular at the onset of the 1980s, but it was in ships not cars. The commercialisation of the US Navy’s ‘Transit’ system, involving five orbiting satellites, was the talking point of the 1981 International Boat Show in London, when sets were on sale for under £2,000. Toyota announced its Navicom guidance gadget in 1983, although the system was initially based on inertial navigation (those gyroscopes and accelerometers) rather than GPS. Other Japanese firms introduced the new sat nav technology into cars at the beginning of the 1990s, with the early models running off CD-ROMS and usually a big box wired up in the boot.
But the watershed year was 2005, when a Dutch company that had sold 250,000 stand-alone devices the previous year, suddenly found that it could barely meet demand. It sold 1.7 million boxes in 2005, and within six years had sold more than 65 million. In-car digital mapping had finally arrived. People wished to be led, and they were willing to trust anonymous companies to take them to places they had previously managed to find by themselves. A similar transformation was taking place on mobile phones.
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Not for the first time, the people at the forefront of a cartographical revolution were Dutch. For some reason that even the people involved can’t explain, the Dutch have recently come to dominate the new digital mapping world in the same way as the Blaeu and Hondius dynasties had dominated the heavy paper one 350 years before.*
The heart of this new empire may be reached by turning right at the end of Damrak, following Prins Hendrikkade, passing the entrance of the waterfront tunnel, turning left into Kattenburgstraat, left again after the train tracks, following Piet Heinkade until the second set of traffic lights, turning right after Muziekgebouw aan het, turning right just before the viaduct, and then there you are at De Ruyterkade 154, the home of TomTom. Here you will find Harold Goddijn, CEO and one of the founders of the company in 1991.
Goddijn, early fifties, fastidious and manicured, used to work for the British handheld computer company Psion, where one of his responsibilities was developing software. He began with book-keeping and translating packages, utilities the busy executive bought on a floppy disc and would then sync from a computer to what was once called a personal digital assistant (PDA). The provision of mapping was a natural extension, but the problems were huge. Storage was expensive in the 1990s, and small devices couldn’t provide the amount of processor power required to plan a random journey through a country. In the mid-1990s, prior to publicly accessible GPS, Goddijn bought early digital map files from a company called Automative Navigation Data (another Dutch company who had spent the previous few years digitising existing printed maps), and he supplied Psion users with a primitive method of plotting a manually scrollable route through the European road network.
‘It’s a very emotional topic’: TomTom co-founder and CEO, Harold Goddijn, with a couple of his early products.
These AND maps covered only about fifteen per cent of all roads, and the concept of real-time, turn-by-turn, spoken directions was still something for futuristic Hollywood movies, but Goddijn soon found that the market was eager for such things. A driver could plan a simple route between London and Paris from the written instructions on a PDA, and even though it would have been easier to do such a thing on an old-fashioned ring-bound road atlas, the idea of being on a portable machine seemed like the glittering future.
Which of course it was. Within a few years everything expanded – memory, processing power, route accuracy and GPS – and within a decade the first reliable stand-alone, voice-guided sat navs that knew where you were and how to take you somewhere else began appearing on the high street. ‘We got emails coming out of our ears from people who couldn’t stop telling us how liberated they were and how happy we made them,’ Harold Goddijn claims. ‘It’s a very emotional topic. The feeling of getting lost in a car is very intense and the cause of misery. Everybody’s been there. And the man and wife thing is ridiculed, but there is something in that. “Go left … no … I told you so.” It’s all real.’
Goddijn says he was astonished by the success of his product, and his supply had trouble keeping up. ‘If you go to a bank and tell them, “It’s now 2001, and my revenue is about seven million euros. But next year it’s going to be forty million. And then 180 million the year after, and then 800 million and then 1.4 billion” – they just wouldn’t believe you.’
But he is at a loss to explain precisely why the demand for these moving maps had suddenly begun to take hold in the world. It can’t be reliability, because nothing was more reliable than a paper map. It can’t be cost, because the old maps were far cheaper. It may be safety – the sat nav should be less distracting than paper maps, but it may be distracting in a different way, and the catalogue of mishaps with the devices increases each week. It may be the built-in speed cameras, which means sat nav motorway drivers in the UK now get a little warning beep if they deviate from the standard practice of driving at 77 mph in the middle lane on motorways. It may get you to a destination faster, but sat nav owners will tell you that most familiar routes they can drive faster without
it. And surely it can’t be the lure of Homer Simpson or Jeremy Clarkson.
So perhaps it is the fact that it limits the amount of route controversy in a car (in other words, arguments, usually involving a man and a woman). Or perhaps it is the fact that those who really believe they have absolutely no sense of direction and can’t read maps can now find other things to worry about. Or perhaps it is just that we have lost the pleasure and challenge of traditional maps, and like to have someone do the map reading for us. In other words: laziness.
‘It’s true to a certain extent,’ Goddijn concedes. ‘There is a charm in reading maps, and there’s more information on maps. There is a maritime equivalent: if you want to become a sailor you have to take a course in navigation and rightly so. You learn how to read a map and plot a course, how to do dead reckoning. A beautiful skill, but nobody uses it, because there’s GPS and it works. So the skill becomes rusty, and people don’t bother. And that’s the same for car navigation. It’s all very romantic to look at a map, but it’s dangerous to use when driving. You always have to stop somewhere. I don’t think it’s realistic to assume that in ten or twenty years’ time people will still use paper maps. Is that good or bad? I don’t know. We’re moving on.’
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But there are already signs that we are not entirely satisfied with this new life. In 2008, the demand for sat navs began to slow down and even turn around, as the market edged towards saturation. TomTom faced increasing competition from free maps provided by Google, OpenStreetMap and others. To slow down the migration, TomTom devices have increasingly come laden with new innovations, some more gimmicky than others, including the ability to tweet your destination. Users may also benefit from what is called ‘historical traffic’ – anonymous data about routes and journey times gathered from drivers by central TomTom computers which is then used to improve future guidance.
In order to strengthen its hold on the market, TomTom bought its main supplier of digital maps Tele Atlas, another Dutch company, for almost US$3 billion. Tele Atlas still makes many of its maps in the old-fashioned way, by going out and recording what it sees, although now the maps are compiled not with quill and sextant but in a car battened down with roof cameras, lasers and 3-D imaging machines, all of which enable pinpoint locational accuracy but tend to miss landmarks set slightly away from the road that were significant in a pre-digital age, such as Stonehenge.
The resulting maps also have an effect on the way we learn to see things. When we’re looking at maps on our dashboard or on phones as we walk, we tend not to look around or up so much. It is now entirely possible to travel many hundreds of miles – to the other end of a country, perhaps, or even a continent – without having the faintest clue about how we got there. A victory for sat nav, a loss for geography, history, navigation, maps, human communication and the sense of being connected to the world all around us.
Pocket Map
The Canals of Mars
Sir Patrick Moore’s house is in Selsey, surrounded on three sides by sea. It is fifteen minutes’ drive from Chichester in Sussex, and the cab driver says ‘Oh yes –’ when you climb in, ‘– it’s the one with all the telescopes.’
Moore, the UK’s best known and undeniably strangest astronomer, lives in a universe that revolves around his study. This houses his library of books on space and exploration, including about a hundred of his own – books on the mapping of the moon, books on Neptune and most other planets, novels he has written about many worlds other than his own. The room holds some small globes and telescopes, a vintage Woodstock typewriter and many medals, badges and other souvenirs from his travels. And then, occupying all other places, are his mementoes of The Sky at Night, the BBC programme he has hosted for more than 700 episodes, latterly with increasing help from other stargazers, including corkscrew-haired Queen guitarist Brian May.
Moore is aged eighty-eight when I call on him, the same number as there are constellations. ‘I can no longer get into the garden to look at the sky,’ he says mournfully, ‘and I can no longer play the piano.’ He is wearing a crimson toga. He suffers increasingly from a back injury (RAF, WW2), and his arthritis is painful. His hands and legs are swollen, the eye that usually takes a monocle is half-closed. He is, I fear, a dying planet, but from his padded swivel chair he is still a force around which things revolve: one day a month the Sky at Night team transform his office into something resembling a planetarium, bringing in additional globes, darkening the leaded windows and making Moore look like the squinty big-gussetted amateur we first encountered many moons ago when we chanced upon his eccentric enthusiasms on late-night television.
I had called on him to talk about the mapping of Mars, and within two minutes I was laden down with his own books on the subject, including Mission To Mars, Peril on Mars, Can You Play Cricket on Mars?, The Domes of Mars, and The Voices of Mars. Written over a fifty-year period, the books had one thing in common (apart from being about Mars): they almost all contradicted each other. Patrick Moore’s Guide to Mars, written in the late-1950s, was so different from Patrick Moore on Mars, written in the late-1990s, that it may as well have been about a parallel universe.
Patrick Moore in his study at home, surrounded by celestial and terrestial globes – and more than a hundred of his own books.
‘Ah, the Red Planet!’ Moore exclaims as I ask him about the changes he has seen in his lifetime. ‘Before the Mariner spacecraft went there [in the 1960s and 70s] we thought we knew a lot, but we knew hardly anything. We had to change the maps and the names on the maps. I remember giving a talk at a university and almost everything that I told them turned out to be wrong!’
Moore was not alone. The entire atlas of the universe has changed fundamentally in the last century, as the power of telescopes and space rockets has taken us closer than ever before. But the cartographic history of Mars is a saga unlike any other, and not only because the planet is on average 140 million miles away, and more than seven months away by spacecraft (on average, the moon is only about 239,000 miles and four days away). This, and its relatively small size (about a third of the surface area of the earth), have made accurate observation difficult; when Galileo first looked through his telescope at the beginning of the seventeenth century he found Mars too unobservable to say anything interesting about. But it is not what astronomers couldn’t see that makes Mars so intriguing, but what they could, or thought they could: canals, hundreds of them, perhaps thousands of them, and vegetation too, enough to feed a whole hungry nation of Martians. Life on Mars? That was a theory dreamt up not by science fiction writers or Hollywood; that was down to astronomical mappers.
In 1946, fresh from flying over Germany, Patrick Moore flew to Arizona. He was twenty-three and hooked, like many astronomers both before and since, on the story of the great observatory at Flagstaff, from where Pluto had first been seen sixteen years before. Although he didn’t discover it himself (he was actually dead at the time), the PL in Pluto was named after Percival Lowell, the man who had set up the Flagstaff observatory and installed its exciting 24-inch refractor telescope principally to study Mars. Flagstaff continues to be an important astronomical venue, but for a while it was regarded as a slightly nutty place, run by a man who, in Patrick Moore’s words, ‘claimed that Mars must undoubtedly be inhabited by beings capable of building a planet-wide irrigation system.’
Percival Lowell observing Mars from the observer’s chair of the 24-inch refracting telescope in Flagstaff, Arizona.
Lowell wasn’t a crackpot, he was a serious astronomer (he was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and before that he was a career diplomat, representing US interests in Korea and Japan.) But in 1894 he became obsessed with a theory that went something like this: Mars was in trouble; it was running out of water; it was inhabited by intelligent beings; the reason we knew it was inhabited, and they were intelligent, is because they had constructed long straight canals to hold water and guide it down from its melting ice caps. Lowell be
gan to publish these theories in 1895, and his maps appeared in national newspapers as the subject of serious debate. A Mars mania took hold. Science fiction had found its supposedly factual springboard, and the expansive imaginations of H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury and others would find a fertile readership. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to believe in the prospect of life that the maps suggested; even the possibility of future colonisation.
Percival Lowell was the first astronomer to give the canals a proper living backstory, but he wasn’t the first to see or map them. That honour goes to Giovanni Schiaparelli, the Italian who did more than anyone else to give every place on Mars a name. He too drew long linking straight lines on his maps of the planet, but he wasn’t drawn on whether they were waterways or some other phenomenon; besides, he called them canali, which merely means a channel, and could easily have been a product of nature rather than a product of Martians with spades; some even believed that the ‘canals’ were nothing more than a telescopic reflection of veins in the viewer’s bloodshot eye.
While the barely viable vision of life on Mars goes forth into the world – it lasted precisely seventy years, from Lowell’s book Mars in 1895 to the day the Mariner 4 orbiter sent back its first photographs in 1965 and recorded a thin and very inhospitable atmosphere – let us consider how Mars was mapped before giant telescopes and space probes. It was predominantly a place of ghostly shapes and shadows, often obscured by dust and prone to seasonal transformations, distant and insignificant enough to absorb any delusions or fanciful nomenclature we may place upon its surface.
On The Map: Why the world looks the way it does Page 29