SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Pedestrians, horses, trolleys — and a growing fleet of automobiles — clogged early 20th Century streets in America. Travel was slow, navigation dangerous, and traffic cops stood amid the chaos at their own peril.
Enter Lester Farnsworth Wire, the dean of Salt Lake City’s inaugural traffic squad and arguably the inventor of the world’s first electric traffic light in 1912: A birdhouse-like box with red and green bulbs on each side to signal stop and go to travelers.
Wire is one of several men who lay claim to the title “Stoplight Inventor,” but Utah celebrated the 100th anniversary of his creation Thursday with a new display that includes a replica of the original signal.
So how progressive was Wire in 1912?
There were plenty of skeptics, said Eric Rasband, statewide signal manager for the Utah Department of Transportation.
“When he said this is what he was going to do, he had people showing up basically to laugh at him,” he said. “But it became a success, and ultimately, you look at 100 years later, many of us would not fathom crossing a busy intersection without a traffic signal.”
Salt Lake City is known for being a pedestrian- and bike-friendly city. Orange flags sit in buckets at busy crosswalks for pedestrians to wave as they cross the street to alert approaching cars, and bike lanes line busy downtown streets of this outdoorsy city in the shadow of the Wasatch Range.
Utah also installed the first inter-connected traffic signal system in the world in 1917, with lights at six intersections controlled simultaneously from a single switch.
But first appeared the original stoplight, a creation that came to be known as “Wire’s Bird Cage” and “Wire’s Pigeon House,” according to research by Linda Thatcher of the Utah State Historical Society in 1982.
Traffic cops had already had several near misses while manually directing traffic in the middle of Salt Lake City intersections, so officers were moved to the side of the road in the early 1900s.
So Wire built a wooden box resembling a birdhouse and installed two bulbs on each side — one bulb dipped in green paint, the other dipped in red paint. The box sat in the middle of the intersection and, once connected to overhead trolley wires, enabled officers from the side to flip a switch and direct traffic.
“We’re still not sure how he came up with it, but it was pretty innovative, using reds and greens and regulating traffic that way,” said Mark Taylor, traffic signal operations engineer for the Transportation Department.
Taylor also said he doesn’t think Wire had a patent for his invention, which explains the competing claims about the world’s first traffic signal.
As early as 1868, a device with an arm that extended horizontally signaled stop and, when at a 45-degree angle, caution. And in 1914, a system in Cleveland, Ohio included four pairs of red and green lights, each mounted on a corner post and manually operated by a switch inside a control booth. That system was patented in 1918 by James Hoge, according to History.com the website for The History Channel.
Regardless, Wire addressed a real safety problem at that time, Rasband said.
“There was a lot of chaos in the road. There was no concept of right of way,” he said. “There were a lot of styles of signals. Ultimately, this was the predecessor to the green, yellow and red that we’re so used to seeing today.”
