mental_floss Blog: The Origin of Traffic Lights
“Long before the invention of the internal combustion engine, horses and people were already having so much trouble yielding to each other at intersections that, in 1868, a British railroad engineer designed the first traffic signal to help them out. Oddly, the contraption only featured two settings: ‘stop’ and ‘caution,’ indicated by a bar held horizontally or lowered to a 45-degree angle.” Okay, I can’t be that old. I remember seeing a 45 degree bar someplace, on a stop light mechanism.
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