Greatest Inventions: Have you ever wondered who invented the traffic lights? Has it ever come to your mind while driving through the traffic signals that who discovered the Red, Green & Yellow Lights? If you are curious to know the answer to such questions, then you have to look back on the Traffic Lights History and their invention. So, let’s find out about the inventor and the history of Traffic Lights.
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A British railway manager, John Peake Knight, suggested adapting a railroad method for controlling traffic. So, the first traffic signal was invented by JP Knight, a railway signaling engineer. Railroads used a semaphore system with small arms extending from a pole to indicate whether a train could pass or not. In Knight's adaptation, semaphores would signal "stop" and "go" during the day and at night red and green lights would be used. Gas lamps would illuminate the sign at night. A police officer would be stationed next to the signals to operate them.
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A diagram of an early pedestrian crossing signal. (Image credit: U.S. Department of Transporation)
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On December 1868, the world's first traffic signal was installed at the intersection of Bridge Street and Great George Street in the London borough of Westminster, near the Houses of Parliament and the Westminster Bridge, and looked like any railway signal of the time, with waving semaphore arms and red-green lamps, operated by gas, for night use. Unfortunately, it exploded, killing a policeman. The accident discouraged further development until the era of the internal combustion engine.
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If we look back into history, the problem of traffic jams has been around since the 1800s even before the invention of the automobile. At that time Horse-drawn carriages and pedestrians crowded the roads of London.
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Many new inventions are coming up for improving the traffic signal systems by using the latest technologies. A scenario published by the researchers at the MIT Senseable City Lab in 2016 suggested that traffic signals are essentially nonexistent. Under such a scenario, all autonomous cars are in communication with each other in what is known as a "slot-based" intersection in which cars, instead of stopping, automatically adjust their speed to pass through the intersection while maintaining safe distances for other vehicles. This system is flexible and can also be designed to take pedestrians and bicyclists into account.
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Rapid Flow Technologies of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania is coming out with an innovation called 'Surtrac'. The company is doing Pilot Tests since 2012. As per their innovation, traffic signals can use artificial intelligence to adapt to changing traffic conditions. The company says travel times have been reduced by more than 25 percent and wait times at red lights have down an average of about 40 percent decreasing emissions. The system takes into account second-by-second real-time conditions and is scalable to larger areas since each intersection makes its own decisions instead of a single, central system.
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