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

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