On this day in 1914, the American Traffic Signal Company installed the world’s first patented electric traffic light on the corner of East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio. The system, patented by James Hoge, was an improvement over previous efforts at directing traffic, though it was similar to a temporary 1912 device installed in Salt Lake City by Lester Wire, a local police officer that was drafted to fight in World War I before he could pursue a patent. Previous efforts included a gas-lit mechanism installed in London in 1868, which was dismantled after it exploded a month after being installed.
Hoge’s light, which was also manually operated by a traffic officer in an attached booth, had a red light, a green light, and a warning buzzer that indicated when the light was about to change. Yellow lights would not be introduced to the design until 1920, thanks to William Potts, a police officer from Detroit. In 1923, Garrett Morgan, an inventor and the child of former slaves, patented a three-color t-shaped traffic signal device that he later sold to General Electric.These improvements and others were later joined by computerized systems in the 1950s and countdown timers for pedestrians in the 1990s. The August 1954 “traffic safety class” in the photograph seen above is part of the Hagley Library’s collection of Chamber of Commerce of the United States photographs and audiovisual materials, Series II. Nation's Business photographs (Accession 1993.230.II). To view more items from this collection online, visit its page in our Digital Archive by clicking here.
