December 10

Do you spend a great deal of time thinking about traffic lights? If you are anything like me, probably not. The lights are quite common and seem to be everywhere. I certainly don’t need to add another item to the list of boring things that I do. I had always assumed that traffic lights started appearing at roughly the same time that cars appeared on the scene – the early 20th century. That was not the case, however. The very first traffic light began operation on the 10th in 1868, when J. P. Knight installed a gas-powered, manually operated, traffic light outside the British Houses of Parliament in London, England.