Which came first, traffic lights or cars?
3 Answers
Traffic lights existed before cars in the world. The first traffic light in the world appeared in Parliament Square, London, UK, and was installed in 1868. The first car in the world was created by Karl Benz from Germany, and it appeared in 1886. About Karl Benz: Mr. Karl Benz was the creator of the automobile, and later he founded an automobile manufacturing company, which is Mercedes-Benz. About Mercedes-Benz: Mercedes-Benz is a luxury car manufacturer from Germany, and it is also the inventor of the automobile. Mercedes-Benz has many luxury SUVs and sedans, as well as high-performance models. The top luxury sedan from Mercedes-Benz is the S-Class, a large luxury sedan that competes with models like the BMW 7 Series and Audi A8L. The new S-Class has a wheelbase of 3165 mm, with length, width, and height measuring 5259 mm, 1899 mm, and 1497 mm, respectively. About the engines of the new Mercedes-Benz S-Class: The new S-Class uses two engines, one being a low-power 3.0-liter turbocharged engine and the other a high-power 3.0-liter turbocharged engine. (1) The low-power 3.0-liter turbocharged engine produces 299 horsepower and a maximum torque of 420 Nm. (2) The high-power 3.0-liter turbocharged engine produces 367 horsepower and a maximum torque of 500 Nm.
This is really interesting! I've done some research and found that the first traffic light device appeared in 1868 at the entrance of the London Parliament, a full 18 years before the birth of automobiles. It was originally designed for horse-drawn carriages, with a gas lamp mounted on top fitted with red and green glass, requiring a police officer to manually rotate it. Unfortunately, the gas lamp exploded once and injured a policeman, leading to its discontinuation. It wasn't until 1912 that electrically controlled modern traffic lights appeared in Salt Lake City, USA, by which time cars had already been on the streets for over twenty years. So traffic lights predated cars by 18 years, but it took much longer for them to be properly paired with automobiles. Today's smart traffic lights can even sync with navigation systems—something the designers of those gas lamps could never have imagined.
When I was a child, my teacher told me that traffic lights actually appeared much earlier than automobiles. In the 19th century, carriages ran rampant on London streets, so police invented gas lamps with red and green glass as signals. Karl Benz didn't manufacture the first automobile until 1886. However, the earliest gas lamp traffic lights were notoriously unreliable - I read in history books that they were abandoned after an explosion accident. Ironically, it was the explosive growth of automobiles that truly popularized traffic lights. When Detroit installed its first three-color traffic light in 1920, Ford's assembly line had already produced millions of cars. Such traffic management tools always mature later than the vehicles themselves, just like how mobile games emerged years after mobile phones.
