The Traffic Light and Other Everyday Technology

Three Signal Traffic Light - The Bullock Texas State Museum

Everyday we encounter and use numerous technological gadgets and appliances without even thinking about it. All of these inventions have been improved through many iterations to serve its purpose and solve our problems. Here is how some of our everyday technology has been created.

Three Signal Traffic Light

Inventor and newspaperman Garrett Morgan was born in 1877 in Kentucky to two formerly enslaved Black Americans. Moving to Ohio, Morgan started as a handyman in Cincinnati at 14. In 1907, he opened his own repair shop which blossomed into a huge success. With the money from the repair shop, Morgan started a newspaper called the Cleveland Call and it became one of the most important black newspapers in the country.

Morgan used his money to purchase a car in a city with an assortment of different vehicles like bicycles and horse-drawn carts. There were traffic lights in the area, but they only switched between “stop” and “go”. This was ineffective because drivers had no time to react. Due to the poorly designed traffic lights, there were many accidents between vehicles that entered the intersection at the same time. Witnessing one of these collisions, Morgan had the idea to create a traffic signal with a yellow light that allowed drivers to check the intersection before driving. Morgan patented his invention on November 20, 1923 and it served as the basis for modern traffic lights.

Photography

Adventurer and Inventor Hercule Florence created a method of light reproduction in 1833 to capture the birdsongs of the Amazon Rainforest. Florence wanted to print a transcription he had used to catalog the sounds in the rainforest. In the 1820s, Florence joined an expedition as a painter to capture natural observation with watercolor. However, he was bored by his paintings and wanted to capture what he truly saw, not just an imitation. These naturalist expeditions had created a lot of knowledge through cartography and in encyclopedias, but Florence wanted to experiment with sonic inventory. He captured the sounds of many animals in the rainforest in a manuscript.

In 1831, Florence sought to publish his manuscript but ran into many dead ends. Due to the spread of anti-colonial propaganda, the Portuguese Crown decided to limit the number of printing presses in Brazil. Unaffected, Florence utilized a resource limited by none and available to all, sunlight. He first used photography to reproduce old artifacts and symbols with his method working similarly to the modern photocopy. Florence continued to experiment with his invention but ultimately did not use it to print his manuscript and a printing press agreed to publish it.

CAPTCHA

In 2000, Yahoo Inc., an America-based Internet service company, faced the problem of computer programs pretending to be humans in their chat rooms. The company contacted Carnegie-Mellon University and a team of computer scientists led by Manuel Blum created the CAPTCHA (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart). The early CAPTCHA consisted of an image of distorted letters and numbers that a human could recognize but a computer program could not. However, as computer programs evolved, so did these images, until a point where humans also couldn’t read them. Now, CAPTCHAs are based on identifying a certain object like a boat.

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~ Edited by Christian Mueth

References:

1. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/garrett-morgan-patents-three-position-traffic-signal
2. https://aperture.org/editorial/light-writing-tropics/
3. https://www.britannica.com/technology/CAPTCHA

This article was originally published at the Teach-Technology Organization, Inc. online technology blog. I volunteer as a tech blog writer at this organization, which is dedicated to bridging the gap between seniors and technology. You can read this article (and many more) at the Teach Technology site.