The first traffic signal came before the first motor car. The crowd of people and carts near the British House of Commons was getting intolerable, with snarls of one sort or another becoming almost a daily affair. So a railway engineer, J. P. Knight, adapted a system widely used to control train crossings for street use – the first traffic light, a revolving red-and-green lantern, the prototype of the modern electrical one.

On this day, August 5, in 1914, the first electric traffic light system was installed on a busy street corner on the corner of Euclid Avenue and East 105th Street in Cleveland, Ohio.

The traffic light was based on a patented design by James Hoge, whose “Municipal Traffic Control System” intended to allow police and fire services to manually control the traffic signals. The Cleveland light had four faces, one for every corner, and each with a pair of red and green lights to indicate stop or go. The light would be controlled manually from a nearby booth, and set up so conflicting signals were impossible.