On August 5, 1914, a curious new device was installed at the corner of East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio: the world’s first electric traffic signal. With its red and green lights, a buzzer for the color-blind, and a clever design by a young African-American inventor, it transformed the chaos of the early automobile age into ordered motion.
The Problem: Chaos on Euclid Avenue
By 1914, American cities were drowning in cars. Cleveland’s Euclid Avenue was one of the busiest streets in America — a mix of streetcars, horse-drawn wagons, pedestrians and an exploding number of automobiles. Policemen stood at intersections waving their arms; accidents were routine. The American Traffic Signal Company sought a better way and turned to Garrett Morgan, an inventor who had already patented a safety hood (an early gas mask) and a hair-straightening product.
Garrett Morgan’s Invention
Morgan’s design, patented in 1923 (building on the 1914 Cleveland installation), added a crucial third position to the red-and-green light: an all-directional stop that cleared the intersection before traffic flowed in the new direction — the ancestor of today’s yellow light. The 1914 Cleveland signal itself was designed by James Hoge, whose patent is usually credited for the first electric traffic light, using the red/green railroad-signal convention. Both men, working in the same city in the same decade, helped write the visual language that now governs every street on Earth.
A Global Language in Three Colors
From that single Cleveland intersection, the traffic signal spread worldwide: yellow arrived in the 1920s, the first modern four-way three-color light was installed in Detroit in 1920, and by mid-century the red-amber-green triad was a universal language. Garrett Morgan went on to become one of America’s most celebrated Black inventors, his traffic-signal patent cited for generations. Every time you wait at a light, you’re participating in a system born in Cleveland on an August day in 1914.
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