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Sam Penrod Reporting As Utah gets ready to celebrate Pioneer Day, a BYU professor says he has made a new discovery about a critical tool the pioneers used to get to Utah.
There have been replicas made of what the original pioneer odometer is believed to have looked like, but now a BYU engineering professor says he has determined what the actual gear dimensions were-- information that's been considered to be unknown for the last 150 years.
When Brigham Young said, "This is the Place," 159 years ago when the first Mormon pioneers to arrive to Utah, knew how far they had traveled. One of those pioneers, William Clayton, was documenting the trek. Initially he would count each time a wagon wheel went around.
Larry Howell, BYU Engineering Professor: "That was a very tedious thing to do and he used that as an argument with Brigham Young and others that they needed to build some kind of a device to make the measurement."
From Howell's research using pioneer journals, theories of gear designs, and good old fashioned mathematics, he believes the odometer was 18 inches long, 15 inches high, three inches thick and made up of four gears turning on three shafts.
Larry Howell, BYU Engineering Professor: "The wagon wheel using was on Heber C. Kimball's wagon, which was designed to be exactly the right circumference, so 360 revolutions of that wagon wheel, would be a mile."
Howell says the pioneer odometer was surprisingly accurate, down to 1/60th of a mile, and it was built by pioneer craftsmen on the plains of Nebraska.
Joseph Jacobsen, BYU Grad Student: "It took a good amount of time for me to build this one with all of our modern tools and so it was a real feat for them to build it in the back of their wagons at night, once they were done moving."
A new discovery today, of just how sophisticated Utah's founding fathers were.
Larry Howell, BYU Engineering Professor: "Here is an opportunity to look back in time and history and actually use engineering and the knowledge of history to make some discoveries of the past, which is really an exciting thing."
So how far did the pioneers travel? Thanks to that first odometer, we know it was 1,032 miles.
