Do you want to reach the other end of the city? No problem. You take out your mobile, type in Google Maps the place you want to go to and follow the instructions. Or even easier. That you are in Madrid and want to move, for example, from Principe Pío to Sales? Well, you download the Metro app and access precise information about the route, connections, times and even the estimated capacity.
If you are not a friend of looking at screens while traveling, nothing happens: you have the plans on paper.
However, things were not always so easy. Around the 30s and 40s of the last century, getting around the bustling and eclectic Paris metro, whose network already had 13 lines in 1935, required a good knowledge of the seasons and of the city itself. If you were a newcomer or did not dominate the map, you risked ending up wandering around one of the great capitals of Europe.
Aware of this problem, around 1937, those responsible for the Parisian metro devised a clear and educational system so that passengers, even the very novice, could find their way around its network of galleries, lines and connections: Plans Indicateurs Lumineux d’itinéraires, better known by the acronym PILI. After all, 85 years ago perhaps there were no smartphones nor the GPS systems, but the electronics were already there to lend a hand to those who needed to know the best route.
Follow the light bulbs
Broadly speaking, PILI was an electromechanical map of the subway equipped with light bulbs and a horizontal panel with buttons that allowed passengers to select the different stations.
Let’s say it was the first time you used the service, you didn’t speak a bit of French and you wanted to move from Pont Marie to Porte de Charenton. PILI made it easy for you: you only had to press the button of the last station —by default it understood which games of the terminal in which you used it— and its mechanism lit up the path on the map, pointing out each of the stops.
A light bulb lit for each station you traveled to your destination.
Easy.
Intuitive.
Not much room for mistakes.
The stations were even arranged alphabetically.
L’ancêtre de la recherche d’itinéraire RATP sur les applications mobiles et le web. Les PILI (plan indicateur lumineux d’itinéraires) ont été conçus en 1937 et en service jusqu’au début des années 2000. pic.twitter.com/UzInm4Vf5z
— Song ¾ (@SongPKM) June 30, 2022
Perhaps it did not report on capacity or incidents, such as smartphonesbut of course it wasn’t not bad for 1937. The system worked so well, in fact, that shortly thereafter there were already more than 80 of those devices deployed in Paris, and by the 1980s—in 1981, to be precise—the RATP (Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens) was managing 184.
Many Parisian children saw PILI as a huge set of light bulbs and keys, and its characteristic boards became part of the urban landscape of the city of lights, just like the streetlights or the Seine promenade. What arose from pure necessity, from the charitable desire to prevent travelers from ending up swarming around the subway disoriented, ended up being elevated to the category of almost a symbol, one more piece of urban props, perfectly identifiable for any Parisian, just like the white logo , blue and red of the London underground or the reddish red rhombus that identifies the one in Madrid.
That it had permeated the visual identity of the neighbors does not mean, however, that it enjoyed the pardon of time. As the decades passed, technology advanced and it was confirmed how burdensome the maintenance of those electromechanical maps, PILI lost interest.
In the 1990s, the authorities believed that it was smarter to adapt to the new times and began to implement a device adapted to extensions and with CD-i technology, the Plan Lumineux Interactif (PLI). The old PILI were losing strength in the 90s and the 2000s. Already in the second decade of the XXI the Zenway system was adopted, digitized and more complete.
In symbolism and memories, the old PILI panels probably continue to take the cake, however. Such is the footprint they left that have inspired works of art and literary passages.
“As a child, I had to be snatched from this painting whose illuminations I wanted to test,” recalls the writer Jane Sautière in Stations (between lines)—. Sometimes the constellation was magnificent when, by chance, he had chosen a route with many connections. Celestial figures took shape, Ursa Minor and Ursa Major, Coronas del Sur, Capricorn and Aquarius… A sky so perfectly lit that I thought I could travel under it. Nothing, in the end, erased this hope.”
There are even those who resist the passage of time and have ended up taking home their own PILI. The rest we can still see some —off, yes— in certain stations in Paris.
A wink for nostalgic.
Images | Wikipedia
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism