Before Sat Nav: The Wristlet and the Iter Avto, Our Quirky Ancestors of GPS from the 1920s

Long before we had celebrity voices telling us when to take the next left or warning us about average speed cameras, drivers had to rely on far humbler contraptions to find their way about. It’s easy to assume paper maps were the only option, but a handful of inventive minds in the early 20th century cooked up what we might now call proto-GPS gadgets. Two such oddities, the Plus Four Wristlet Route Indicator and the Iter Avto, offer a charming glimpse of how our grandparents flirted with the idea of navigation on the move — minus satellites, batteries or digital screens.

A Scroll on Your Wrist

Step back to 1927, when motorists in plus fours and driving goggles could treat themselves to the Plus Four Wristlet Route Indicator. It looked like a chunky watch but hid a miniature scroll map inside. This watch-like marvel needed no power at all. You’d simply wind it by hand, and a paper strip showing your chosen route would unravel from one side while rolling up on the other.

It came with about 20 routes as standard, covering mostly London and its surrounds. If you wanted to venture somewhere new, you’d order fresh scrolls from the manufacturer and pack them like spare socks in your glove box. Switching routes mid-drive was no mean feat: you had to pull over, dig out a new scroll, slot it in, and wind on. Not exactly the turn-by-turn voice directions we’re now accustomed to, but for the spirited motorist of the interwar years, it probably felt reassuringly modern.

One man who knows more than most about this curious bit of kit is Maurice Collins, a genial Londoner whose antique collection has included a Wristlet Route Indicator for years. Maurice, now in his seventies, has lent his Wristlet to museums and exhibitions up and down the country. He still describes it fondly as “an amazing invention,” though he’s quick to admit, “I’ve never tried it myself and I’m not sure how successful it would be as a navigation device. It’s the sort of thing you can imagine Bertie Wooster using and then his butler Jeeves having to dig him out of a hole.” One suspects he’s spot on.

The Iter Avto: Auto-Scrolling Maps for the Motorist Elite

Fast-forward a few years to 1932 and imagine a car dashboard fitted with the Iter Avto — arguably the world’s first semi-automated in-car navigation system. This Italian curiosity took the Wristlet’s scrolling idea and bolted it to the car’s speedometer. As you drove, the map moved on its own, theoretically keeping in sync with your progress.

For the affluent Italian motorist who could afford such a gadget, the Iter Avto must have felt like a little slice of the future humming away beneath the walnut dashboard. Each roll of map was painstakingly drawn with not just roads, but handy warnings about sharp turns, bridges, railway crossings, petrol stations and even places to grab a bed for the night.

The original advertising (once translated from florid Italian) is delightfully earnest:

“Motorists, the Iter-Auto is your patron saint on Earth that will guide you by the hand showing you in your travels with impeccable accuracy… advising in a timely manner (about three kilometres before) the driver must slow down at the face of danger.”

Of course, as with its wrist-worn cousin, there were limits. Stray from your planned route and the scrolling map would keep trundling along oblivious, merrily describing a road you were no longer on. One imagines drivers pulling over under olive trees, map roll in one hand, spanner in the other, trying to reset the thing before continuing on their way.

The Charming Roots of Sat Nav

Both of these gadgets, the Wristlet and the Iter Avto, feel almost absurd now that we have pocket-sized devices talking to satellites thousands of miles above our heads. Yet they show how the idea of a moving map display has fascinated inventors for over a century. These early navigation experiments hinted at what would one day become a world in which live directions are so normal that most people under thirty have never unfolded a road atlas in their life.

Their designers lacked microchips, radio signals or global positioning satellites, but they had the same basic goal: to spare us the awkwardness of pulling over on a rainy verge and wrestling with a map bigger than the car bonnet.

Next time you tap your phone’s sat nav and hear it chirp, “At the roundabout, take the second exit,” spare a thought for the motorists of yesteryear, scrolling away at their wrist or dashboard, praying they didn’t take a wrong turn into a muddy farm track. After all, they were the true pioneers of getting lost less often as the deceptively-simple steering wheel.

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