DeLorme is a topographic and road mapping company based in Yarmouth, Maine, United States.

Founded in 1976, DeLorme is most famous for its paper atlases and gazetteers of all fifty U.S. states. DeLorme is also a leading mapping software publisher. Its products include Street Atlas USA, XMap, Topo USA and Earthmate GPS receivers (PN-20, BT-20, and LT-20).

Its headquarters is also home to Eartha, the world's largest rotating and revolving globe.

History

The company was founded in 1976 by David DeLorme who after being frustrated over obsolete backcountry maps of the Moosehead Lake region of Maine vowed to create a better map of Maine. DeLorme had earlier been publisher of the "The Maine Catalog."

DeLorme pieced together state highway, county, and town maps as well as federal surveys to produce The Maine Atlas and Gazetteer which was printed in a large format book had an initial printing of 10,000 which he marketed out of his car. The Gazetter listed bicycle trails, canoeing and kayaking trips, and museum and historic sites and proved quite successful.

In the 1980s the more detail Atlas (with a scale of half inch equal to one mile) was modified so that it consisted in 70 quadrangles representing the state of Maine. If pieced together the map would have been 14 by 9 feet.

In 1986 the company expanded to 75 employees operating out of a Quonset hut in Freeport, Maine and produced maps for New England and upstate New York.^[1]

In 1987 the company produced a Compact Disk with a high level topographic map of the entire world entitle Eartha. North America and Europe based on a scale of ten miles to the inch while other parts of the world were on a scale of 20 miles to the inch.

The early success led to government and private sector contracts.

In 1991 it launched Street Atlas USA on a CD and became the most popular street map CD in the United States.

By 1995 DeLorme 44 percent of the market share for CD maps topping Rand McNally with 25 percent and Microsoft with 17.5 percent. The same year the company partnered with American Automobile Association to the produce the AAA Map 'n Go which was the first CD product to generate automatic routing. It also introduced the DeLorme GPS receiver to work with its maps.^[2]

In 1996, it introduced its maps into the PDA environment via Palm.

In the mid-1990s at the height of its dominance, it was rocked by scandal. In 1995 53 of the company's 180 employees left after a memo went out telling employees that they had to reapply for their jobs. Some of the employees would become whistle blowers resulting in the company in 1999 signing a plea agreement and paying a $780,000 fine following charges that it had falsely claimed ownership of data it had sold the Department of Defense when it sold the same data to other agencies.^[3]

In 1997 it moved out of its quonset hut to a $6 million, 100,000-square-foot building in Yarmouth, Maine that is marked by Eartha its signature globe which is claimed to be the biggest rotating and revolving globe in the world.

DeLorme share of the CD mapping market dropped in 1997 fell to 27 percent behind a surging Rand McNally.

In 1999 it introduced 3-D TopoQuads® DVD and CD products which digitialized U.S. topographic maps.

In 2001 it introduced XMap professional GIS map program on CD. In 2002, it expanded XMap was modified to give GPS functionality to Palm OS and Pocket PC.

In 2005, it broke the $100 price barrier for USB GPS devices with the Earthmate GPS LT-20. At the same time it began offering satellite and USGS 7.5 minute quads that could be ed and overlaid on its maps.

In 2007, it introduced its first full featured GPS standalone receiver -- the Earthmate GPS PN-20 ^[4]

See also

• Maps of the United States
• Geospatial

References

External links

• Company Website
• DeLorme Street Atlas 2008 review - a review by Laptop GPS World

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Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia; from the article "DeLorme". Image Credit.

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