One hundred and one years ago today, drivers in Cleveland stopped at the world's first red light created by an electric traffic signal system.
Engineers installed a pair of green and red lights facing each other in a four-way intersection as an experiment – and the milestone is being marked Wednesday with the Google Doodle. In the doodle, as it was with the inaugural street lights, there are only red and green lights – no yellow. Amber didn't come along until 1920, when the system was modified by a police officer in Detroit.
The light in Cleveland wasn't the first attempt at traffic control – gas-lit traffic signals were used in Britain in the 19th century. However, the gas-lit lights would occasionally explode.
Roads have existed for centuries but, for most of that time, they were chaotic and filled with horses, carts, pedestrians, playing children and merchants. Even though the streets were a zoo, everything moved at a relatively slow speed until the car became a popular form of transportation in the early 1900s.
Here is a look at Market Street in San Francisco in 1906:
They caused an alarming number of deaths and quickly there was a need to regulate. For decades a uniformed officer would stand in the middle of the intersection holding and rotating a sign that said 'stop' on two sides and 'go' on the other two sides.
In the system used in Cleveland, an officer sat in an elevated booth on the sidewalk to control the lights. Other major U.S. cities experimented with similar systems but, after about a decade, Cleveland's was accepted as the best.
The first traffic lights went into operation in Canada in June 1925 at an intersection in east Hamilton. Toronto got its first set of lights two months later. While Toronto was late to do away with officers spinning signs and adopt the electrical system, Canada's largest city was the first in the world to develop and implement a computerized traffic management system in 1963.
Today, it is hard to imagine life without electronically regulated intersections, but when the power goes out, we get a partial glimpse of how it would have looked before those lights were installed in Cleveland in 1914.
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