Fatal Board · VIDEO ESSAY

The Rise and Fall of Rand McNally: The Road Atlas Empire That Owned Every Car, Then Lost All to GPS

Subscribe to the channel! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb0ps9eCp0y6yP1Xg4sDDFw?sub_confirmation=1 For a hundred years, Rand McNally owned the glove compartment of every car in America. One company, one atlas, one folded paper map at every gas station in the country. Then, a few minutes past midnight on May 1, 2000, the United States government switched off Selective Availability, civilian GPS accuracy went from roughly 100 meters to about 10, and the entire foundation of the paper map business quietly disappeared. But the decision that really ended Rand McNally came three years before that, and it was celebrated at the time as the smartest move the company had made in fifty years. This is the full story of the road atlas empire: from a printing shop on Lake Street in Chicago in 1856, to railroad tickets and the Great Chicago Fire, to the wax-engraving trick that made American maps cheap, to the 1907 Photo-Auto Guides that invented turn-by-turn navigation with photographs of intersections, to draftsman John Brink's numbered highways in 1917 and the company crews who went out and painted route numbers onto American telephone poles at their own expense. It runs through the free gas-station map era, the 1924 Auto Chum that became the Road Atlas, the 1973 oil embargo that killed the free map and handed Rand McNally a near monopoly, the 1997 sale that broke the company into pieces, the buying spree that consolidated every printed map competitor in North America, and the two unknown startups that spent twenty years driving every road in America and sold their databases for roughly eleven billion dollars. If you ever navigated for your family from the passenger seat, this one is for you. Tell us in the comments: what year is on the atlas in your house, and where did it take you? SOURCES Rand McNally Publishing Celebrates 100 Years of the "Great American Road Trip" with a Collector's Edition Road Atlas, PR Newswire — https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rand-mcnally-publishing-celebrates-100-years-of-the-great-american-road-trip-with-a-collectors-edition-road-atlas-301797977.html Selective Availability, GPS.gov, U.S. Government National Coordination Office for Space-Based PNT — https://www.gps.gov/selective-availability Nokia buys mapping service for US$8.1 billion, Computerworld, October 2007 — https://www.computerworld.com/article/1565555/nokia-buys-mapping-service-for-us-8-1-billion.html/amp Case No COMP/M.4854 TomTom/Tele Atlas, European Commission merger decision, May 14, 2008 — https://ec.europa.eu/competition/mergers/cases/decisions/m4854_20080514_20682_en.pdf Google's Turn-by-Turn Nav Sends Garmin, TomTom Stocks Plummeting, Fast Company, October 29, 2009 — https://www.fastcompany.com/1427604/googles-turn-turn-nav-sends-garmin-tomtom-stocks-plummeting Rand McNally & Company, International Directory of Company Histories H.M. Gousha Collection, Modern Manuscripts and Archives, The Newberry Library, Chicago Charles B. Peterson III Road Map Collection, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress Rand McNally Auto Chum, first edition, 1924, Rand McNally Road Atlas archive Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration You can contact me at: thefatalboard@proton.me This channel is made by an enthusiast who loves business and technology history — nothing more. All videos are for educational and entertainment purposes only and reflect my personal views and interpretations. I research each story carefully using publicly available sources, but errors or omissions can happen. Nothing here is professional, financial, or legal advice, and this channel is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any company mentioned.