Red, green, yellow! Who cares about traffic lights?

First traffic lights were installed on 10 December 1868.

We use them every day in our contemporary life. We stop every day in one of them! It’s a routine that we get used to it. No one cares about their history anymore. But everything we see in our everyday existence has one…

That happened outside the British Houses of Parliament in London, by the railway engineer J. P. Knight. They looked a lot like railway signals of the time, with semaphore arms and red and green gas lamps for night use. The gas lantern was turned with a lever at its base so that the appropriate light faced traffic. It exploded on 2 January 1869, injuring or killing –we don’t exactly know the policeman who was operating it!

The modern electric traffic light is an American invention. As early as 1912 in Salt Lake City, Utah, policeman Lester Wire invented the first red-green electric traffic lights. On 5 August 1914, the American Traffic Signal Company installed a traffic signal system on the corner of East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio.  It had two colors, red and green, and a buzzer, based on the design of James Hoge, to provide a warning for color changes.

The first interconnected traffic signal system was installed in Salt Lake City in 1917, with six connected intersections controlled simultaneously from a manual switch. Automatic control of interconnected traffic lights was introduced March 1922 in Houston, Texas.  Toronto was the first city to computerize its entire traffic signal system, which it accomplished in 1963.

Some paper ideas from the same date from the past!

KO for eCharta

Woody Woodpecker first appearance in Knock Knock

Woody Woodpecker is a very famous cartoon character with his trademark laugh “Ha-ha-ha-HAA-ha!”, an anthropomorphic pileated woodpecker who appeared in theatrical short films produced by the Walter Lantz animation studio and distributed by Universal Pictures.

In Woody’s first cartoon movie Knock Knock supposedly stars Andy Panda and his father, Papa Panda, but it is Woody who steals the show. The woodpecker continually harasses the two pandas, apparently just for the fun of it. Woody of Knock Knock was designed by animator Alex Lovy and Woody’s original voice was actor Mel Blanc. Ironically, Blanc’s characterization of the Woody Woodpecker laugh had originally been applied to a Bugs Bunny prototype, in shorts such as the Elmer’s Candid Camera, and was later transferred to Woody.

Audiences reacted well to Knock Knock, and Lantz realized he had finally hit upon a star to replace the declining Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Woody would go on to star in a number of films. With his distinctive boldness and brash behavior, the character was a natural hit during World War II. His image appeared on US aircraft as nose art, and on mess halls, and audiences on the home-front watched Woody cope with familiar problems such as food shortages.

Woody Woodpecker first appeared in the short Knock Knock was as today on November 25, 1940.

It’s really fun to collect comics and cartoon items and there are a lot of enthusiasts around the world that are crazy about this material!

Some paper ideas from the same date from the past!
KO for eCharta