August 5

Cleveland, Ohio is the alleged birthplace of Rock and Roll (Thank you Alan Freed). Well perhaps not the genre Rock and Roll. Nevertheless, the term Rock and Roll definitely came from Cleveland. Is that enough for a city to stake its claim to fame? I think not. On the 5th in 1914, The American Traffic Signal Company installed the first electric traffic lights in the United States at the intersection of 105th Street and Euclid Avenue in bustling Cleveland. The traffic signal had only two colors. Can you guess which ones? Unsurprisingly, they were red and green. It did have another really neat feature: To alert drivers and, presumably, pedestrians, the signal were also equipped with a buzzer to warn everyone that the lights were going to change. I think it would have been better if the signal came equipped with a speaker system which would broadcast things like ‘Hey, you. Yeah, you, the fat guy with the packages, get ready to run across the street, the light is going to turn green RIGHT NOW!’ That would be much less annoying than a buzzer and the chances for some funny accidents would certainly be greater.