A closer look
Benjamin Franklin invented a rudimentary odometer in the eighteenth century simply because he wanted to figure out the most efficient routes for delivering the mail across the American colonies; while serving as the postmaster general, Franklin attached a mechanical device to the wheel of his horse-drawn carriage that would count the rotations and accurately calculate the miles traveled along the dusty, miserable roads of the era, using this brilliant contraption to personally map out the delivery routes, standardizing postage rates based on exact distances rather than arbitrary guesses, which drastically improved the notoriously terrible colonial mail system, perfectly capturing the essence of a founding father who was so fundamentally annoyed by administrative inefficiency that he went ahead and invented a piece of modern automotive dashboard technology just to make sure letters arrived on time
