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Facts about traffic lights.
You might not know the name Lester Wire but you see his invention every day. His designs have been
developed and altered since, including one for traffic lights which were operated by honking. Obviously
these were quickly abandoned after residents complained about the noise.
The first British electric traffic light…
Do we actually need them?
… didn’t come until 1925 when it was installed in London.
These were operated by a police officer however – the first
automatic lights were installed in Wolverhampton in 1927.
In Oct 2015 in Beverley, East Yorkshire the 42 traffic lights at
the busy Grovehill junction in the east of the town stopped
working. The reason had something to do with the
bewildering nest of wires in a control box, and so the repair
took a few days.
But the first non-electric traffic lights…
… were manually operated gas lamps hung outside the
Houses of Parliament in 1868.
Why didn’t they catch on?
Because within four weeks of first being installed they
exploded, injuring the poor policeman operating them.
Why those colours?
You would have thought that chaos and lengthy tailbacks
would have ensued. After all, the lights manage 20 different
traffic flows and nine pedestrian crossings in a fiendishly
complex pattern that’s become notorious as one of Britain’s
most complicated junctions.
Doubtless, there must have been more than a few accidents
— shunts, head-on collisions, perhaps the odd pedestrian
sprawled on a bonnet. However, much to the bewilderment
of traffic experts, the absence of the lights had the very
opposite effect. The traffic flowed far more quickly and
smoothly. What’s more, there were no accidents.
Red, amber and green were used on the railways at the time
and are now known as universal signals for stop, wait and go.
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