The First Traffic Lights
The busy crossroads outside the Houses of Parliament was the testing ground for a new technology.
December 8 1868
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
Traffic lights in Parliament Square, London.
© Tamara Menzi, Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
Parliament Square, London. This photo looks down Great George Street towards Bridge Street (leading on to Westminster Bridge) and ‘Big Ben’, or more properly Elizabeth Tower. Close inspection will reveal several sets of traffic lights, near to the spot where the world’s first traffic signals were erected, in December 1868: that was at the crossroads just beyond the bus. The accompanying account comes from the Express, an evening newspaper that from 1846 to 1869 was issued as a companion to the Daily News (1846-1912).
Introduction
The first traffic lights in the world began operation outside the Houses of Parliament on December 9th, 1868. The previous evening, readers of the Express learnt about the ingenious if somewhat ungainly new technology, and looked forward to a time when all busy junctions would be made safe by traffic lights.
Abridged.
The regulation of the street traffic of the metropolis, the difficulties of which have been so often commented upon, seems likely now to receive an important auxiliary. In the middle of the road, between Bridge-street, and Great George-street, Westminster, Messrs Saxby and Farmer, the well-known railway signalling engineers, have erected a column 20 feet high, with a spacious gas-lamp near the top, the design of which is the application of the semaphore principle to the public streets at points where foot passengers have hitherto depended for their protection on the arm and gesticulations of a policeman often a very inadequate defence against accident.
The lamp will usually present to view a green light, which will serve to foot passengers by way of caution, and at the same time remind drivers of vehicles and equestrians that they ought at this point to slacken their speed. The effect of substituting a red light for the green one and of raising the arms of the semaphore a simultaneous operation will be to arrest the traffic on each side... A more difficult crossing-place could scarcely be mentioned, and should the anticipations of the inventor be realised similar structures will no doubt be speedily erected in many other parts of the metropolis.*
Abridged.
As given in News from the Past: the Autobiography of the Nineteenth Century, 1805-1897 (1934), edited and compiled by Yvonne Ffrench and introduced by Sir John Squire.
* As it turned out, the optimism of the report in the Express for December 8th that year was misplaced. The experiment did not catch on, and traffic signals would not return to the capital until Piccadilly received manually-operated electric signals in 1926. In the meantime, a plucky British idea had benefited from American hustle. In 1912, the American Traffic Signal Company erected hand-controlled, electric traffic lights on the corner of East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio, and in 1922 lights on automatic timers began to appear in Houston. The first automatic lights in England were installed at Princess Street in Wolverhampton, in 1927.
