Which came first in the world, traffic lights or cars?
2 Answers
Traffic lights came first. The invention of traffic lights: Traffic lights were invented in 1868. The invention of traffic lights predates cars by 17 years. However, when traffic lights were first invented, they were intended for the passage of carriages and had nothing to do with cars. The invention of cars: The earliest cars appeared no later than 1885. In 1885, German engineer Karl Benz built a three-wheeled car in Mannheim. This car was equipped with a two-stroke single-cylinder 0.9-horsepower gasoline engine. It was called the world's first modern car because it incorporated some basic features of modern automobiles, such as spark ignition, water cooling cycle, steel tube frame, leaf spring suspension, rear-wheel drive with front-wheel steering, and brake handles.
I'm particularly fascinated by transportation history, and this is quite an interesting question. Traffic lights actually predate automobiles—the world's first traffic light was installed on a London street in 1868. At that time, the area outside the UK Parliament in London was frequently congested with horse-drawn carriages. A railway engineer came up with the idea to adapt the red-and-green gas signal lamps used at train stations for road use, manually operated by police officers. However, automobiles didn't officially appear until 1886 when Karl Benz built the first patented car. That's a gap of nearly twenty years, showing that human ingenuity in solving traffic problems had already sprouted long before. Today, we drivers take automatic traffic lights for granted, but the original signals were actually designed to regulate horse-drawn carriages and pedestrians. It's quite remarkable to think that those who used gas lamps to direct traffic two centuries ago probably couldn't have imagined today's self-driving vehicles.
