The Traffic Light

by Julissa


     Traffic lights, also known as traffic signals, traffic lamps, signal lights, stop lights and robots.
J.P Knight is the person who invented the traffic lights. Maybe because the railroad industry chose
red as the color for stop, it is thought, because red has for centuries been used to indicate danger.
For the other colors, they chose white as the color for go and green as the color for caution. The
choice of a white light for go turned out to cause a lot of problems. For instance, an incident in
1914 where a red lens fell out of its holder leaving the white light behind it exposed. This ended
with a train running a “stop” signal and crashing into another train. Thus, the railroad decided to
change it so the green light meant go and a caution “yellow” was chosen, primarily because the
color is so distinct from the other two colors used. I got this information from:
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/03/the­origin­of­the­green­yellow­and­red­color-
scheme­for­traffic­lights/
J.P picked those colors because of that accident. Red means stop, green means go and yellow
means slow down.