Yet again the Sunshine Coast is bathed in glorious, warm golden rays, a stunning, frosty white morning giving way to a day normally reserved for Provence. It’s the last day of Term, before ten days of rest, relaxation and recuperation for wife and children. I’m thinking of jumping on the magic carpet and taking off to Lapalala, a little slice of heaven in the African bush. That would go down well. Talking of magic carpets made me think of the Middle East and the time I spent in Oman in 1972. (To explain a fairly convoluted train of thinking!) It was when a genuinely mediaeval society was being dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth century. I was there as part of a protection force helping the Sultan keep the marauding Yemeni invaders at bay. Various large firms, such as Taylor Woodrow were there helping to build a harbour and other construction projects. With a totally blank yellow canvas, the town planners had an unrivalled opportunity to create something wonderful, which, in the way of most town planners, they eschewed. I have one bizarre memory though. The oil-rich sheikhs loved to drive the biggest and guzzliest and most expensive wheels they could find. Such cars, generally, need roads and in the Town of Salalah there was one long, straight, black strip that disappeared across the dunes and there, in the middle of the nascent settlement, was a lone traffic light. There was no junction, just the single, vital symbol of Western civilisation. I think it was probably permanently on green, until such time as the crossing road was constructed, but I left before that happened.
For some reason I dreamt about traffic lights last night, which got me wondering about their origin. They’ve become about the most ubiquitous item in the world and generally the best understood, although when driving in Africa it’s important to remember that Green means “Go”, Amber means “GO” and Red means “accelerate hard and GO LIKE HELL”. Anyway, have they always been red, amber and green? Apparently not. As far as I can discover, the first one for road use was devised by a railway engineer who installed a gadget outside the Houses of Parliament in London that used semaphore style arms during the day and red and green gas powered lamps at night. The whole thing was operated manually by a policeman who was unfortunately killed after only one month’s operation when a gas leak rendered the device unworkable. The early signals only had two lights, often using Green for stop and White for go, with the words written on them as well. Red has since become symbolic of danger so its use as a stop signal makes sense, although there is a percentage of the population for whom danger is an attraction.
Just about the first electric traffic light was designed by the appropriately named Lester Farnsworth Wire, a Salt Lake City police officer whose clever design incorporated two bulbs, one dipped in red paint and one in green. The leaders of the free world were already stamping their authority and ingenuity on us lesser beings. In those early days, horses, carts and men with red flags walking in front of internal combustion engines mingled in a haphazard and often dangerous manner, especially in America’s bustling metropolises (metropoli?). Seemingly it took many scary moments and no few fatalities before someone had a light bulb moment and dreamt up the idea of an intermediate amber light.
We have so much to thank America for.
ADayInTheStrifeOf 