Sunday 22 March 2009

Do you know what this is?


Do you know what this is?


It’s a one of these! A map measurer. In the ‘good old days’ before we used the Internet for everything it was a brilliant device for measuring how far a walk or drive was on a map. You roiled it along the route from start to finish and then rolled it back along the scale bar to see what the distance was. Much more accurate than trying to do it with a ruler because you could follow all the ins-and-outs of the road or path. (The map in the background is the old-fashioned 1 mile to 1 inch scale that was the mainstay of the Ordnance Survey for many decades.)

4 comments:

  1. Sometimes, even with a ruler and the measure on the side of the map, we just don't really know.
    I would say, Thank God for mapquest, but that's not always the Best route.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wow, I'm a lover of maps and things old, but I'd never seen one of those. Very cool!

    Don

    ReplyDelete
  3. Pretty nifty little device.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Oh dear. I can't believe that I'm that old. I have/had one of those map measurers and one of the more modern ones based on the same wheel running on the map but with a dial with a needle geared to the running wheel which gave the miles dependent on the scale.

    ReplyDelete

Hello - thanks for dropping by to leave a comment. Your comments are much appreciated even if I don't always reply. They will appear as soon as they have been moderated.

Blog Archive