I scribbled this at lunch about an hour ago. Working again on a Saturday – crunch time.
I was doing some visual research yesterday on city stuff and accidentally came upon some interesting information about the inventor of the traffic light system that’s used throughout the world. I am constantly amazed about the things we take for granted. Sitting at a red traffic light, watching the cross traffic, well, cross, it’s interesting to think – somebody had to invent that traffic signal. I suppose we all kind of think, yeah, some giant corporation somewhere came up with it, etc., etc. But in reality that’s rarely the case. Usually these things are invented by one person and it goes corporate after that, not the other way around. In the case of the traffic signal, it was invented by an American named Garrett Augustus Morgan – a man who’s remarkable not only for the fact that he also invented the gas mask, but that his parents were former slaves in the Confederate South. A brilliant and creative man who became wealthy by his wits, and whose ideas affect virtually all of us several times a day, nearly 130 years after his birth.
Anthony Zierhut 