Road-map wristwatch from 1920

Brilliant design. Quickly, someone design a mashup with Google Maps + Google Web Fonts that spits out printable directions that work with this!

There so much cool design and neat ideas that really were just ahead of their time to be found in the past.

My suspicion is that nearly everything people are breathlessly running to the patent office with these days thinking they've got something new, someone has already tried to pull off with gears and little bits of paper 100 years ago.

They use similar roadbooks in the Paris Dakar rally for use on the motorbikes. http://www.sbs.com.au/blogarticle/108976/Behind-the-Scenes-R...

"The glass window, an improvement on the original device as far as I can tell, stops the paper getting wet in the rain when you are driving your convertible sports car with the top down."

People drive in the rain with their tops down?

This would be an excellent application for a Pebble e-ink watch. I would kill for something like this for motorcycle trips. The usual Google Maps on cellphone navigation isn't very useful, but having a small device strapped outside my jacket wrist with simple a nice big glove-usable button would be great.

The map-on-a-scroll idea was used commonly by aviators at the time, but their maps were strapped to their leg:

http://airandspace.si.edu/exhibitions/gal102/americabyair/ab...

This article is part of a series; glad to see they were aware of the two sports that use roadbooks today:

http://www.core77.com/blog/object_culture/roadbooks_part_3_r...

http://www.core77.com/blog/graphic_design/roadbooks_part_2_p...

Great usability. This is awesome, put a big smile on my face. Very rare for a gadget to do that.

Steampunk! That's the coolest functional design I've seen all year.

That is a cool gizmo. Lots of interesting linear steps kinds of things you might do with it, like cooking for example, each step of the process scroll up to the next step.