On Thanksgiving Day in 1895 the Chicago Times-Herald sponsored a fifty-four-mile road race from Jackson Park to Waukegan and on to Lincoln Park. The prize was five thousand dollars. The eventual winner, a man by the name of Frank Duryea, had at least two advantages over his competitors. First, unlike some of them, he was driving a car propelled by gasoline. Second, Duryea had noticed that the paper had published a rough plotting of the course, and he’d had the good sense to rip it out and use it. He thus made not only money but history. By virtue of his action the Times-Herald illustration transcended newspaper graphics to become the first American automobile road map.

The distinction is significant only in retrospect; at the time its effects were nil. After all, what need was there for road maps when, even in 1900, there were a mere eight thousand registered automobiles in the entire country? But as the century shifted into gear, things changed. By 1910 almost a million cars had been registered; by 1915 more than two million. With this new popularity came innovations in the superstructure of motoring, innovations that, considering their improvised character, proved to be surprisingly durable. In 1908 came the first concrete road, a mile-long stretch of Detroit’s Woodward Avenue. Almost immediately motorists from hundreds of miles around made pilgrimages to drive on it. This was a year after the first pedestrian safety island, in San Francisco, and three years before the first painted dividing line, in Michigan. In 1914 Cleveland introduced the first electric traffic signal, and Buffalo put up the first no-left-turn sign in 1916.

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