Henry Metcalfe’s Road Map Exhibitor

Before satellite navigation people navigated using maps which of course can be large cumbersome affairs not best suited to the confines of a vehicle - let alone an early open topped automobile. In 1905, Henry Metcalfe, a 58 year old retired US Army Ordnance officer and firearms inventor, filed a patent for the Road Map Exhibitor. Metcalfe’s patent describes his invention:

“The exhibitor consists of a tube, Fig. 2, made of thin transparent celluloid, inside of which a road map or maps may be coiled the maps being visible through the substance of the tube…  and means for supporting the device on the dash or front board I) of the automobile, as in Figs. 1, 3, 5, and 7. It may of course be used on other vehicles, but it is designed more particularly for automobiles, since touring is largely confined to that class of vehicles.”

The Exhibitor could be mounted on the dashboard of a vehicle and would protect a map from the elements. The driver could uncoil the map from the tube as the journey progressed along the route. Metcalfe noted that the Exhibitor “affords perfect protection to maps within it from dust, dirt, and water, while affording easy facility for observing the map at any time when on a journey in any weather.”

The Road Map Exhibitor predates later short-lived automobile map developments such as the wrist map of the 1920s and the Italian motorised map roll, the Iter-Auto, developed in the 1930s. None of these devices caught on and conventional maps remained the order of the day. 

Henry Metcalfe was previously an ordnance officer who worked at the Frankford Arsenal, he patented a number of small arms related inventions and later a neat little pocket notepad. He died in August 1927, aged 80.

Sources:

‘Road Map Exhibitor’, US Patent #841800, 22 Jan, 1907, H. Metcalfe, (source)

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