Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. When I am picking episodes to run as
Speaker 1: Saturday Classics, I like to keep an eye out for
Speaker 1: things like anniversaries and birthdays, and I stumbled onto one
Speaker 1: that delighted me this time around, which is that the
Speaker 1: first traffic light was installed one hundred and fifty five
Speaker 1: years ago today, on December ninth, eighteen sixty eight. It
Speaker 1: was patterned after signals that were already in U sport trains.
Speaker 1: We talked about this in our episode on the Rise
Speaker 1: of Traffic Lights, which originally ran August nineteenth, twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1: One of the things that we talked about in this
Speaker 1: episode is the effect that traffic lights have had on safety,
Speaker 1: which is one of many factors affecting safety for everyone
Speaker 1: who uses the roads. Motor vehicle deaths in the US
Speaker 1: have continued to be much lower than they were before
Speaker 1: traffic signals were introduced if you factor in how many
Speaker 1: vehicles are on the road. As an update on that,
Speaker 1: since this episode came out, death rates and motor vehicle
Speaker 1: crashes have actually been increasing, and death rates for pedestrians
Speaker 1: have been rising much much faster than that of other
Speaker 1: road users. According to a report from the Governor's Highway
Speaker 1: Safety Association drivers killed more than seventy five hundred pedestrians
Speaker 1: with their vehicles in twenty twenty two. That is the
Speaker 1: highest number since nineteen eighty one. Other than that upsetting statistic,
Speaker 1: enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and Welcome to the podcast. I'm
Speaker 1: Holly Frye and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. So, Tracy. Traffic
Speaker 1: lights are part of everyday life. Uh huh. I mean
Speaker 1: I grew up in a place that had none that
Speaker 1: now has a blinker light, but still I grew up
Speaker 1: in a place that are where the area we live
Speaker 1: did not have any, and now it has dozens. It
Speaker 1: grew very quickly but pretty common at this point, and
Speaker 1: both pedestrians and drivers tend to count on them, particularly
Speaker 1: in cities. And recently, as I was sitting in my
Speaker 1: car at a stop light late at night, I was
Speaker 1: on my way home from the airport, and the light
Speaker 1: refused to turn, so I eventually had to make a
Speaker 1: right turn instead of the left turn I was trying
Speaker 1: to make, and then you turn so that I could
Speaker 1: get through that intersection without breaking laws. And it got
Speaker 1: me to wondering who invented traffic lights? Also because it
Speaker 1: was late at night and my brain works that way
Speaker 1: when I'm Meandre And it turns out that if you
Speaker 1: google that question, you get a whole lot of different answers.
Speaker 1: So I thought it might be fun to look at
Speaker 1: a few of the moments in traffic light history that
Speaker 1: got us where we are today and talk about some
Speaker 1: of those various contenders to the who did it first question.
Speaker 1: But before we get into the traffic lights origins, we're
Speaker 1: going to cover a little bit of what made traffic
Speaker 1: lights and necessity in the first place. That, of course
Speaker 1: was cars, and cars have a whole history all on
Speaker 1: their own, because, like a lot of other inventions, a
Speaker 1: whole lot of different inventions had to happen to get
Speaker 1: to the point where there was a vehicle that could
Speaker 1: actually carry a driver and get somewhere. It wasn't as
Speaker 1: though one person was kind of toiling away with the
Speaker 1: idea and then a car popped out of their workshop
Speaker 1: fully formed. And this is an issue that comes with
Speaker 1: some debate about who should get credit for what, similar
Speaker 1: to the development of the airplane. So we're not here
Speaker 1: to tease out that particular debate today we're going to
Speaker 1: focus on the debate of traffic lights, but it is
Speaker 1: worth noting some of the inventions along the way. So
Speaker 1: Nikola Joseph Kuno, for example, built a steam powered tractor
Speaker 1: for the French military in seventeen sixty nine and that
Speaker 1: could reach the blistering speed of about two point five
Speaker 1: miles per hour. And an electric carriage was being worked
Speaker 1: on in Scotland by a man named Robert Anderson as
Speaker 1: really as the eighteen thirties. But it's Carl Friedrich Benz
Speaker 1: who usually gets the credit for inventing the first vehicle
Speaker 1: that someone might actually call a car or automobile in
Speaker 1: terms of how we think of it today. In the
Speaker 1: mid eighteen eighties, he came up with a design for
Speaker 1: a gasoline vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine. This
Speaker 1: car had three wheels and he patented it in his
Speaker 1: home country of Germany. In eighteen seventy six, George Baldwin Selden,
Speaker 1: a US inventor, started designing a vehicle with an internal
Speaker 1: combustion engine. Also, he never built one of his cars,
Speaker 1: which was designed with four wheels, but he did get
Speaker 1: a patent for it, and then he licensed that patent
Speaker 1: to other manufacturers. In eighteen eighty six, Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler
Speaker 1: improved on previous efforts with his auto called a Constant Diimler,
Speaker 1: which featured four wheels and a four stroke internal combustion engine.
Speaker 1: In eighteen ninety three, brothers Charles and Edgar Durier became
Speaker 1: the first US auto manufacturers with their car, which had
Speaker 1: a four horse power, two stroke motor. Things really got
Speaker 1: moving at the dawn of the twentieth century. In nineteen
Speaker 1: oh one, Diimler's company produced a Mercedes that jumped the
Speaker 1: industry forward. It could go as fast as fifty three
Speaker 1: miles per hour, and it had a thirty five horsepower engine.
Speaker 1: Not everyone was keeping pace with the level of engineering
Speaker 1: that was coming out of Germany, but the Mercedes was
Speaker 1: not something everyone could afford or have access to. About
Speaker 1: the same time, Ransom E. Olds introduced a much cheaper
Speaker 1: vehicle in the United States that was far less powerful.
Speaker 1: It only had three horse power and it was steered
Speaker 1: with a tiller. Yeah. I like to think of these
Speaker 1: things happening concurrently, like this goes fifty three miles per hour.
Speaker 1: It's super fast and pretty amazing. I got a tiller,
Speaker 1: but was it worked. In the United States, the rise
Speaker 1: of the automobile's popularity is credited, of course, to Henry Ford.
Speaker 1: It was Ford who managed to keep up with the
Speaker 1: latest innovation and make cars more accessible to a wider
Speaker 1: range of incomes. For example, that tiller situation was very
Speaker 1: affordable but not really technologically advanced, and Ford kind of
Speaker 1: married these two concepts. By nineteen oh six, Ford Motor
Speaker 1: Company was turning out one hundred cars a day from
Speaker 1: its production line. The fifteen horsepower Ford Model N, which
Speaker 1: was in production from nineteen oh six to nineteen oh seven,
Speaker 1: sold for six hundred dollars, and its success was what
Speaker 1: led to the development of the Model T, which debuted
Speaker 1: in its earliest incarnation in October of nineteen oh eight
Speaker 1: with a twenty horsepower engine, and it cost eight hundred
Speaker 1: twenty five dollars. From that point, Ford continued to refine
Speaker 1: the Model T for the next nineteen years, with subsequent
Speaker 1: editions of the car coming in at lower and lower
Speaker 1: price points, falling all the way down to less than
Speaker 1: three hundred dollars in nineteen twenty seven. So, naturally, with
Speaker 1: more and more people able to afford motor cars. Roads
Speaker 1: got busier and busier, and that led to the rather
Speaker 1: predictable problems of traffic and accidents. It's estimated that by
Speaker 1: nineteen thirteen, there were two million drivers in the US
Speaker 1: and one point two million vehicles on the road. At
Speaker 1: this point, the rules of the road were pretty nebulous
Speaker 1: in more rural areas, while roads were less established. There
Speaker 1: were also not all that many drivers, but in cities,
Speaker 1: population dence also meant traffic density. Also, in nineteen thirteen,
Speaker 1: New York City was said to have gotten to the
Speaker 1: point where it had two traffic jams each day at
Speaker 1: peak hours. Chicago was experiencing slow down of its city
Speaker 1: trolley service because the main thoroughfares became jammed, making it
Speaker 1: difficult to maintain a regular schedule. By nineteen sixteen, San
Speaker 1: Francisco had twenty six thousand cars on the streets, as
Speaker 1: well as ten thousand horse buggies. So there's also that
Speaker 1: multiple different kinds of vehicles taking up the road problem,
Speaker 1: and there was often talk in major cities that traffic
Speaker 1: made automobiles slower than horse carts. Some people abandoned cars
Speaker 1: pretty early on for this very reason. They thought it
Speaker 1: was not in fact, an advancement. Press around the globe
Speaker 1: featured stories debating the merits of cars and whether they
Speaker 1: really represented a step forward or backward. And while early
Speaker 1: cars were developed in Europe, especially France and Germany, the
Speaker 1: costs remained high enough there that the increase in motor
Speaker 1: traffic didn't pace as quickly as it did in the
Speaker 1: United States. Europe didn't really start to have traffic issues
Speaker 1: until the mid nineteen twenties. So you have probably seen
Speaker 1: photographs of city streets from this era where there are
Speaker 1: street cars, pedestrians, horse drawn carriages, and cars all on
Speaker 1: the road at the same time. It almost always looks
Speaker 1: pretty chaotic. That is because it was. Even though larger
Speaker 1: cities sometimes stationed police at busy intersections to try to
Speaker 1: manage things, that was not a super effective way to
Speaker 1: do it, since there also wasn't always a really clear
Speaker 1: set of rules or signals that all of those motorists, pedestrians, etc.
Speaker 1: Would all recognize, and it tended to be a lot
Speaker 1: of honking cars and whistleblowing and everyone still kind of
Speaker 1: doing what they wanted and hopefully getting out of the way.
Speaker 1: The National Safety Council started tracking automobile related deaths in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirteen, and that year four two hundred people died.
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirteen, an accident in Cleveland kind of brought
Speaker 1: this problem into a sharp focus. There was a March
Speaker 1: dinner party that had ended in George Harbaugh, who was
Speaker 1: an oil man, was driving home and when he turned
Speaker 1: onto the city's busy Euclid Avenue, his car was hit
Speaker 1: by a street car. And there were no fatalities in
Speaker 1: this particular case, although that was considered rather miraculous, and
Speaker 1: it did make the papers and kind of started a
Speaker 1: bigger discussion about it. Even before traffic accidents got to
Speaker 1: be a big issue, enterprising problem solvers were on the case.
Speaker 1: And depending on how you define a traffic light, there
Speaker 1: are a few contenders for the title of first. We'll
Speaker 1: talk about all those different firsts after we take a
Speaker 1: quick sponsor break. So before the break we mentioned lots
Speaker 1: of different efforts at controlling traffic, and that means first
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about a man named John Peak Knight.
Speaker 1: He was born in Nottingham, England, in eighteen twenty six,
Speaker 1: and from the time he was just a child he
Speaker 1: really loved trains. He left school at the age of
Speaker 1: twelve so that he could work at the Midland Railway Company.
Speaker 1: Although that was a job that was in the mail room,
Speaker 1: it wasn't working directly with trains, but just the same
Speaker 1: it started his railway career and he continued to work
Speaker 1: for railway companies as he moved up the industry ladder.
Speaker 1: He's sort of that classic like I started in the
Speaker 1: mailroom and eventually I started running things. And he was
Speaker 1: really good in terms of having an eye for solving problems.
Speaker 1: For example, the BBC, in an article about him, credited
Speaker 1: him as the inventor of emergency brake cords in trains.
Speaker 1: In eighteen sixty five, when he was in his late thirties,
Speaker 1: Night had an idea he'd already been designing signaling systems
Speaker 1: for trains, and couldn't that same system be adapted for
Speaker 1: use on the roads. Again in eighteen sixty five, you'll
Speaker 1: recall from the top of the show that while there
Speaker 1: were some attempts at motorized vehicles that had been made
Speaker 1: before this time, there really weren't cars as we think
Speaker 1: of them in existence, but there were more and more
Speaker 1: horse drawn carriages. They were turning into a traffic problem,
Speaker 1: and more importantly, a safety issue for pedestrians, so Knight
Speaker 1: suggested to the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police that he could
Speaker 1: adapt the semaphore system used for trains to help with
Speaker 1: managing road traffic. So his design featured arms that were
Speaker 1: held in specific positions to signal whether it was safe
Speaker 1: to pass, and for nighttime travelers this system would switch
Speaker 1: over to using red and green lights. Those were colors
Speaker 1: which were adapted from railway usage, and the railways had
Speaker 1: adapted those from maritime signals. Three years after having this idea,
Speaker 1: Night's design was installed on December ninth, eighteen sixty eight
Speaker 1: near London's Westminster Bridge and the intersection of Great George
Speaker 1: Street and Bridge Street. A police officer had to operate
Speaker 1: the signals, and to educate the public, flyers were posted
Speaker 1: that explained how these lights worked. They showed images of
Speaker 1: the semaphore arms lowered at an angle which meant you
Speaker 1: could proceed but with caution, and with the arms raised
Speaker 1: so that they were parallel with the ground and that
Speaker 1: meant stop. And these flyers also explained that the green
Speaker 1: and red lights would be used at night. The copy
Speaker 1: on the flyer's read police notice street crossing signals. Bridge
Speaker 1: Street Palace Yard. By the signal caution, all persons in
Speaker 1: charge of vehicles and horses are warned to pass over
Speaker 1: the crossing with care and due regard to the safety
Speaker 1: of foot passengers. The signal stop will only be displayed
Speaker 1: when it is necessary that vehicles and horses shall be
Speaker 1: actually stopped on each side of the crossing to allow
Speaker 1: the passage of persons on foot. Notice being this given
Speaker 1: to all persons in charge of vehicles and horses to
Speaker 1: stop clear of the crossing. Richard Maine, Commissioner of the
Speaker 1: London Metropolitan Police and once installed, this traffic light had
Speaker 1: a pretty immediate positive effect. People understood what it was about,
Speaker 1: they had been educated, traffic was kind of under control,
Speaker 1: but unfortunately it was a short lived project. In early
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty nine, so just around a month after it
Speaker 1: had been installed, during an evening shift, one of the
Speaker 1: gas lamps that was used for the light based night
Speaker 1: signaling exploded due to a faulty gas mean and the
Speaker 1: policeman that was on duty was very badly burned and
Speaker 1: night system was immediately abandoned. In the United States, early
Speaker 1: efforts were made and a number of cities to try
Speaker 1: to control traffic before traffic signals came along, and they
Speaker 1: had variable success. There was no one way to do it,
Speaker 1: so everybody was trying their own thing. Some cities started
Speaker 1: using sign systems that read things along the lines of
Speaker 1: stop or proceed. These didn't light up, so they weren't
Speaker 1: as much help at night, which was unfortunately when they
Speaker 1: were needed the most. In nineteen twelve, a Salt Lake City,
Speaker 1: Utah policeman named Lester Wire created his own traffic light.
Speaker 1: Wyre was born on September third, eighteen eighty seven in
Speaker 1: Salt Lake, and as a young man, he enrolled at
Speaker 1: the University of Utah, but the financial strain of paying
Speaker 1: for school ended his education early. He left college in
Speaker 1: nineteen ten, and at that point he took a job
Speaker 1: on the city's police force. In nineteen twelve, the Salt
Speaker 1: Lake City PD formed a new division to deal with traffic,
Speaker 1: and Wire was put in charge of that division. He
Speaker 1: had to figure out a way to make order out
Speaker 1: of the growing problem of having trolley's, pedestrian buggies, and
Speaker 1: cars all traveling the same roadways. At first, he wrote
Speaker 1: regulations and rules to manage the traffic. Those were Salt
Speaker 1: Lake City's first traffic laws, and he positioned a police
Speaker 1: officer at the city's busiest intersection to direct the traffic.
Speaker 1: But he realized pretty quickly that while it did help
Speaker 1: to have an officer directing traffic, this approach did not
Speaker 1: seem terribly efficient, and it was actually a pretty hard
Speaker 1: job for the officers involved. They would have to keep
Speaker 1: that position manned in all kinds of weather, and shifts
Speaker 1: were often really, really long, and there was also just
Speaker 1: the inherent danger of standing in traffic trying to enforce
Speaker 1: entirely new regulations. These concerns led Wire to start working
Speaker 1: on his traffic light. His light is often described as
Speaker 1: looking like a birdhouse, and that's apt, although in terms
Speaker 1: of its size it's closer to a little fort area
Speaker 1: in a cat condo. It had two round holes on
Speaker 1: each of its four faces and was mounted on a
Speaker 1: ten foot pole. It had red and green lights thanks
Speaker 1: to bulbs that Lester Wire dipped into paint. This was
Speaker 1: attached to overhead trolley wires and was manually operated by
Speaker 1: a police officer using switches, So although it still had
Speaker 1: to have a person operating it in this roadside booth,
Speaker 1: it remained an improvement over standing in the middle of
Speaker 1: the street to direct the traffic. Wire's invention inspired additional
Speaker 1: innovation and it continued to impact Salt Lake City as
Speaker 1: a front runner in traffic control. In nineteen seventeen, Salt
Speaker 1: Lake City became the first city in the United States
Speaker 1: with an interconnected traffic light system, which was automated by
Speaker 1: the mid nineteen twenties. Wire did not get rich off
Speaker 1: of this. He didn't patent his system. He continued working
Speaker 1: on the police force and eventually became a detective, which
Speaker 1: is what he did until he retired. Uh Cleveland, though,
Speaker 1: often gets the claim to fame for the first electric light,
Speaker 1: and that was thanks to engineer James Hodge. Hodge's design
Speaker 1: included the words stop and go on light up signs
Speaker 1: that sat on the four corners of an intersection, and
Speaker 1: he had not yet received a patent on his traffic
Speaker 1: light when he installed it, but it went up on
Speaker 1: August fifth, nineteen fourteen, at the intersection of Euclid Avenue
Speaker 1: and one hundred and fifth Street. You'll recall that story
Speaker 1: about the person in the bad accident took place on
Speaker 1: Euclid Avenue, so that was part of why it was
Speaker 1: considered a good candidate for something like this. Unlike today's lights,
Speaker 1: hodges invention wasn't on a timer or automated in any
Speaker 1: way to change, with an inductive loop embedded in the road,
Speaker 1: His light also had a human operator. A policeman was
Speaker 1: stationed in a booth on the side of the intersection.
Speaker 1: He manually changed the lights from red to green with
Speaker 1: a switch. The system was designed to prevent any accidental
Speaker 1: conflicts in the signals, which some other systems had encountered,
Speaker 1: which is also sometimes a problem on trains, which was
Speaker 1: one of the earlier inspirations for these ideas. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: one like automatically you would have to cut off a
Speaker 1: signal from one side to have the other one lit,
Speaker 1: so that it fixed that little problem. Additionally, the Cleveland
Speaker 1: system had a function that could trigger all of the
Speaker 1: light to go red at once. It was basically like
Speaker 1: one master switch that the policeman on duty could flip
Speaker 1: and that would allow emergency vehicles to pass without obstruction,
Speaker 1: which is kind of a cool design. Additional safety elements
Speaker 1: were included in the controller's booth. It actually had a telephone,
Speaker 1: and it had two telegraph lines directly to the police
Speaker 1: and the fire department. Hodge applied for a patent for
Speaker 1: his design the municipal traffic control system and received that
Speaker 1: patent in nineteen eighteen. But before that patent was issued,
Speaker 1: the first automated system had been installed in San Francisco.
Speaker 1: And there are more innovators to talk about in the
Speaker 1: traffic lights origin story. But before we get to all those,
Speaker 1: we're going to hear from one of the sponsors that
Speaker 1: keep stuff you missed in history class going. So while
Speaker 1: Hodge was awaiting his patent, another innovation was also developing
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventeen, this time in Detroit, Michigan. William Potts
Speaker 1: was a Detroit policeman born in eighteen eighty three who
Speaker 1: saw the need for additional information for motorists in this
Speaker 1: whole traffic light plan. He thought maybe they should warn
Speaker 1: them about an impending red light. So it was Potts
Speaker 1: who added the yellow light to the traffic light equation
Speaker 1: that was first put into use in nineteen twenty. He
Speaker 1: also innovated by developing the first four direction light. Garrett
Speaker 1: Morgan was another man who saw the need for a
Speaker 1: transitional warning in between driving and stopping. Morgan was born
Speaker 1: on March fourth, eighteen seventy seven in Paris, Kentucky. He
Speaker 1: was the son of a formerly enslaved man as his
Speaker 1: father Sidney Morgan, and his mother was Elizabeth Reid, who
Speaker 1: was of Native American and African descent, and Morgan left
Speaker 1: school to work full time in his early teens. He
Speaker 1: was incredibly clever when it came to figuring out how
Speaker 1: machines worked and just being able to see a problem
Speaker 1: and solve it. And actually he was also really interested
Speaker 1: in continuing his education because when he started to earn
Speaker 1: money from his first job, which was a handyman, he
Speaker 1: was working for a fairly wealthy employer. He used that
Speaker 1: money to hire a tutor so he could continue to
Speaker 1: get educated. He worked in the sewing machine industry, repairing
Speaker 1: and refining machine design, developed a chemical relaxer for hair,
Speaker 1: and also created an early gas mask. In nineteen twenty three,
Speaker 1: thanks once again to his ingenuity, he became part of
Speaker 1: the history of traffic lights. Morgan's decision to work on
Speaker 1: the traffic problem allegedly came from having witnessed an accident
Speaker 1: in an intersection, and he was also a motorist. He
Speaker 1: was the first black man in Cleveland, where he was
Speaker 1: living at the time. To own a car, and he
Speaker 1: saw that cars that suddenly saw a stop signal weren't
Speaker 1: always able to break in a timely manner before they
Speaker 1: got into the middle of the intersection, so he was like,
Speaker 1: we should tell them the red lights coming. So Morgan's
Speaker 1: design was a T shape with arms that transitioned from
Speaker 1: straight up to down at an angle, with positions for
Speaker 1: the arms that designated different messages. Morgan was savvy in
Speaker 1: business and patented his invention not only in the US,
Speaker 1: but also in Canada and Britain, and then sold the
Speaker 1: pat to General Electric for forty thousand dollars. Morgan has
Speaker 1: a pretty fantastic life story, so he might get an
Speaker 1: episode all his own at some point. Yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: whole story about him, unrelated to any of this traffic business,
Speaker 1: really doing some heroic things and never getting credit because
Speaker 1: he was a black man until much later in the game.
Speaker 1: He also, just like I said, was mind blowingly smart,
Speaker 1: which always fascinates me. Automatic timers developed in World War
Speaker 1: One helped move traffic light technology forward once the war
Speaker 1: was over, and while some efforts had been made in
Speaker 1: automatic lights that required no policeman to manually flip switches,
Speaker 1: in the nineteen twenties, the technology rapidly became the rule
Speaker 1: rather than the exception. There were almost one hundred automatic
Speaker 1: lights in New York by nineteen twenty six, and that
Speaker 1: freed up literally thousands of police personnel that had been
Speaker 1: standing in intersections to work on other vital rules. I
Speaker 1: think I saw a statistic that of like three thousand
Speaker 1: officers who routinely were positioned at traffic intersections, they were
Speaker 1: able to drop that back to five hundred that routinely
Speaker 1: kept doing it. By nineteen thirty, most US cities and
Speaker 1: towns had installed some sort of stop light system, and
Speaker 1: to some degree, they became emblems of progress and modernity,
Speaker 1: while towns without them came to be regarded with a
Speaker 1: measure of disdain. I would say that's still the case
Speaker 1: for a lot of folks who grew up in places
Speaker 1: that don't have them just because they're too small. Yep.
Speaker 1: The pejorative use of the phrase one horse town came
Speaker 1: to suggest the insignificant place, and that shifted over time
Speaker 1: to the one stoplight town, although both continue to be used.
Speaker 1: I feel like I hear one horse town more often,
Speaker 1: just personally, I use on one stoplight town more often,
Speaker 1: Possibly because I grew up in one and was like, ugh,
Speaker 1: which is terrible. Don't talk that way about anybody's town.
Speaker 1: Other people live there and love it. Maybe that's because
Speaker 1: I grew up in a place that had more horses
Speaker 1: than stop lights, which again was zero. Maybe international adoption
Speaker 1: of traffic lights was a little slower, but in nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty two Paris installed It's for traffic light. At that
Speaker 1: point it was only red, so it was like you
Speaker 1: could either go or the red wood light up in
Speaker 1: that meant stop. It didn't have the intermittent different messaging
Speaker 1: or like proceed with caution. Berlin joined in with traffic
Speaker 1: light installation in nineteen twenty four. It was almost nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty before London really embraced street lights. There had been
Speaker 1: a few that popped up here and there, but the
Speaker 1: invention of the electric traffic signal offered a safer alternative
Speaker 1: to the gas light system that had met its catastrophic
Speaker 1: end in the eighteen sixties, so they were a little
Speaker 1: more willing to adopt them again. And once the US
Speaker 1: had started to achieve a level of uniformity in its
Speaker 1: stop lights across the country, which happened kind of organically
Speaker 1: in some ways, because people were noticing each other's designs
Speaker 1: and kind of all working on improving everything together, and
Speaker 1: once they kind of started to get pretty uniform, other
Speaker 1: countries would just adopt the US models. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: if you haven't traveled a ton in the US, it's like,
Speaker 1: the traffic lights aren't really identical from one state to another,
Speaker 1: but they're similar in that you can make sense of them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you always know, like you're gonna see the lights stacked
Speaker 1: pretty much in the same order. If it's a vertical
Speaker 1: stop light, some are horizontally laid out. But yeah, you're
Speaker 1: not going to like suddenly drive into another state and
Speaker 1: be like, WHOA, I don't know what any of these
Speaker 1: signals mean. Yeah, you're pretty uniforms as long as you
Speaker 1: are not colorblind, which it is the color combination that's
Speaker 1: not great in terms of colorblindness. As with the introduction
Speaker 1: of any new technology, though, there was backlash to all
Speaker 1: these new lights. Detractors felt if a mechanism on the
Speaker 1: road managed the flow of traffic, people would stop paying
Speaker 1: attention to each other. They're also concerns that this would
Speaker 1: lead to social isolation for motorists and even more concerning
Speaker 1: that lack of connection would lead people to treat each
Speaker 1: other with more impatience and less respect. It's like these
Speaker 1: folks who were probably labeled as alarmists at the time
Speaker 1: were pretty apprecient. Nobody had coined the term road rage
Speaker 1: at that point. To combat these concerns, some auto clubs
Speaker 1: in the nineteen teens started sponsoring courtesy weeks, where motorists
Speaker 1: were urged to treat other drivers as well as pedestrians,
Speaker 1: with extra respect. I sort of love that, let's have
Speaker 1: a week where we're extra extra nice. I think we
Speaker 1: should have courtesy weeks for everything, But as a pedestrian,
Speaker 1: the overwhelming amount at the time, I agree, Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: and some of that too, I feel like, is just
Speaker 1: because like if you grow up like in a place,
Speaker 1: or if you live in a place where there isn't
Speaker 1: much pedestrian traffic and then you move to somewhere where
Speaker 1: there is, Like there have been times because growing up
Speaker 1: we didn't have a lot of pedestrian traffic in my
Speaker 1: town where I drew all the time, and then when
Speaker 1: I was suddenly driving in a city, I was like, WHOA,
Speaker 1: I got to watch for people. It's easy to not
Speaker 1: have flex that muscle and have to learn it at
Speaker 1: a slightly slower ramp. Yeah, that's also true with bikes.
Speaker 1: If you've never driven a place underpot of bike traffic
Speaker 1: and bike lanes, it's a totally different awareness, Like the
Speaker 1: amount of time it takes a bike to get to
Speaker 1: you versus the amount of time it takes a pedestrian
Speaker 1: to get to you, or just totally different. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: there was another big concern in the midst of all
Speaker 1: of these traffic lights being adopted, particularly as they became automated,
Speaker 1: was that if there was not a police officer present,
Speaker 1: people felt that most motorists would just disregard the lights anyway.
Speaker 1: That isn't entirely off base. Of course, in the modern era,
Speaker 1: there have been cameras installed on a lot of stoplights.
Speaker 1: They're not everywhere, but certainly there are many to combat
Speaker 1: this problem because that was a legitimate concern. People will
Speaker 1: look around and run a light if there's not a
Speaker 1: policeman present. Sometimes. Incidentally, if you ever played that game
Speaker 1: red Light, Green Light when you were a kid, you
Speaker 1: can thank Cleveland's education system. Maybe. The Smithsonian article from
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen mentions that a school teacher in Cleveland came
Speaker 1: up with a game in nineteen nineteen to help children
Speaker 1: learn and understand the new rules of the road as
Speaker 1: governed by traffic lights. Two thousand and eight obituary, The
Speaker 1: La Times credited children's TV host Bill Stula with inventing
Speaker 1: the game as a way to get kids to drink
Speaker 1: milk in the early nineteen fifties, so totally different purpose.
Speaker 1: There are also variations of this game played around the world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel like we don't really know for sure what
Speaker 1: the origins of La Green Light are, but I thought
Speaker 1: it was worth a mention. So you may be wondering
Speaker 1: what was the net benefit of the establishment of stoplights
Speaker 1: and other safety measures, And if you look strictly at
Speaker 1: the number of fatalities, it might seem like things got
Speaker 1: worse instead of better. We mentioned earlier, for example, that
Speaker 1: forty two hundred people died as a result of car
Speaker 1: crashes in nineteen thirteen in the US, and in twenty
Speaker 1: seventeen the number was forty two hundred thirty one. But
Speaker 1: if you actually break it down in terms of numbers
Speaker 1: of fatalities, as that's related to the numbers of vehicles
Speaker 1: on the road, that situation changes in a hurry. In
Speaker 1: nineteen thirteen, thirty three point three eight people died for
Speaker 1: every ten thousand vehicles on the road. Death rate in
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen was one point four to seven per ten
Speaker 1: thousand vehicles. Yeah, you have to adjust for population density there.
Speaker 1: You can't just go with flat numbers. Yeah. Things did
Speaker 1: not immediately get better, though, they kind of got better,
Speaker 1: and then they got a little bit worse. It took
Speaker 1: time for various cities and towns to start adopting traffic
Speaker 1: lights into their roadways, and even longer, as we said,
Speaker 1: for there to be uniformity across those and other municipalities.
Speaker 1: Things reach their absolute worst in terms of death statistics
Speaker 1: on roadways in nineteen thirty seven, but from that year
Speaker 1: they have fallen pretty consistently. Yeah, and maybe a less
Speaker 1: concretely quantifiable since there's also been a lot of discussion
Speaker 1: lately about cities being built in a way that prioritizes
Speaker 1: cars and what that means for everything from pollution to
Speaker 1: pedestrians being able to get anywhere and whatnot. And you
Speaker 1: could definitely look at that traffic lights and how they
Speaker 1: were implemented as a piece of all of that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it is interesting, right, I mean, traffic lights are
Speaker 1: not the only thing going on. People were like, hey,
Speaker 1: we should have some signs and stuff like what if
Speaker 1: wet belts. Yeah, there were there were some parallel developments
Speaker 1: going on in different avenues of the traffic Safety Roadmap
Speaker 1: to really mix some metaphors up all crazy. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: traffic lights are one of those things. And I'm, like
Speaker 1: I said, sort of fascinated when you think about it. Right,
Speaker 1: when I think about Daimler or Bins or Henry Ford,
Speaker 1: I wonder if they could ever comprehend like the photos
Speaker 1: that you see of like a modern city at rush
Speaker 1: hour and like what happened. It's an interesting thing. I
Speaker 1: know there are a lot of cities that are also
Speaker 1: kind of pushing to remove as many cars from the
Speaker 1: road as possible, just in the interest of pollution and safety.
Speaker 1: And I'll be fascinated to see what happens in the
Speaker 1: next fifty years because cars are also evolving. Thanks so
Speaker 1: much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode
Speaker 1: is out of the archive, if you heard an email
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