![]() Historian Rebekah Oakes on why the yellow light was invented in 1923 “If you don’t go when the light turns green, you’re going to get honked at.” “We’re familiar with that today, here in the D.C. In his patent application, Morgan said his invention would help in “avoiding accidents which frequently occur by reason of the over-anxiety of the waiting drivers to start as the signal to proceed is given.” Today, we know that as the caution light or yellow light,” Oakes explained. “Between ‘stop’ and ‘go’ there would be another option: ‘clear the intersection,’ before traffic resumed moving. However, what separated Morgan’s device from others was a sequence, in which by design, all cars would remain clear of the intersection. The traffic signal Morgan invented “looked like a T-shape, and it had arms you could move in different directions that would indicate ‘stop’ or ‘go,’ and it was powered by a hand crank.” “So, he designed, invented, and patented a traffic signal that would be more prominent in the street,” and that could be operated by a police officer tasked with directing traffic. In addition to “stop” and “go,” Morgan’s original prototype had a signal that stopped traffic in all directions, providing a safe interval for pedestrians. In the early 1920s, Morgan, a Black man from Cleveland, was driving with his two sons in the car: “They witnessed a really horrific accident between a car and a horse-drawn buggy,” said Oakes, resulting in young girl being thrown from the buggy, and an injured horse being humanely euthanized in the street. “Cars, trucks, commercial vehicles were all sharing the road with horse-drawn buggies, pedestrians and they were sharing the road with streetcars in a lot of major cities,” Oakes said. “In the 1920s, vehicular traffic was just emerging as something that was achievable by middle-class Americans, not just the elite,” said Rebekah Oakes, historian for the USPTO.Īt the time, without standard infrastructure, traffic was often chaotic, in part because most drivers were inexperienced. Patent and Trademark Office, Morgan cited one reason for the invention was to alleviate a driver behavior that’s still prevalent in 2023 - drivers honking when a light turns green. Morgan invented what has come to be known as “the yellow light.”Īnd, in his Nov. ![]() Next week marks 100 years since Garrett Morgan was granted a patent for his improved traffic signal, the first signal that contained a step between “stop” and “go” - a cautionary period, in which traffic is stopped in all four directions. Some aggressive driving behaviors never change - even as technology has morphed from mechanical to electronic, to computer-driven. This week marks 100 years since the invention of 'the yellow light' ![]() Business & Finance Click to expand menu.Want more of the world's best Cars content delivered straight to your inbox? Click here to sign up for our daily email. The yellow stop-sign craze began in Detroit in 1915, a city that five years later installed its first electric traffic signal, which happened to include the very first amber traffic light, at the corner of Michigan and Woodward Aves.īut what of those weird yellow stop signs, you ask? As materials and technologies evolved, the ability to produce highly reflective signs meant that red could resume its natural spot in the sign hierarchy, leaving the still-highly-visible yellow (it's second only to red in terms of visible wavelength) to the domain of "caution." That's why school zones and buses, crosswalks, and other important warnings are yellow today. Yellow means "caution" because it's almost as easy to see as redįrom the earliest days of motoring up until the mid-1900s, not all stop signs were red - many were yellow, along with yield signs, because at night it was all but impossible to see a red stop sign in a poorly lit area.
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