¶I realized that the top of the tower in today’s feature image is hard or impossible to see in some browsers (on a desktop, though it shows well on mobile), so I figured I’d post the photo in a separate post today.

¶All feature images force me to think about something, but today’s image really got me thinking about several things that I wanted to write about separately.

¶First, as a patent attorney, I’m always fascinated by visuals that show the development of a technology over time. This photograph does exactly that. It clearly shows a traffic signal with three lights (at least two sides of the tower have a three light system). And, considering the location and time of the photograph (Detroit, sometime between 1915 and 1925), it seems likely that the traffic signal in this photograph is the next generation three light signal invented and innovated in Detroit. The three light system was an improvement on the two light system first installed in Cleveland on this day in 1914 .

¶Progress.

¶Second, seeing the policeman standing in the tower (with a megaphone, btw) caused me to think about a theme that is oft-repeated with the introduction of new technologies: displacement of human workers and jobs. I’ve thought about that issue in connection with seemingly more complicated technology, but never considered the lowly traffic signal as a job killer. Was it one?

¶Wikipedia is helpful on this question:

¶By 1922, traffic towers were being controlled by automatic timers more widely. The main advantage of using the timer was that it saved cities money by replacing traffic officers. New York City was able to reassign all but 500 of its 6,000 officers working on the traffic squad, saving the city $12,500,000.

¶(unfortunately, the full paper cited for that point, The Origins and Globalization of Traffic Control Signals by historian Clay McShane, is not available online)

¶It seems, then, that the wide adoption of automatic traffic signals did eliminate human jobs, even though most affected workers in New York were “reassigned”. The main driver of that adoption, unsurprisingly, was money.

¶Third, I think this photo does a nice job of visually illustrating a reality that frequently accompanies the introduction of new technology. On the surface, everything around the technology appears a bit chaotic. Deeper consideration, though, often reveals advantages of the technology that might be hiding in plain sight. For example, the traffic in this photo, at first glance, seems to be completely snarled. Taking time to look closer, though, you begin to see the order of everything, with the traffic light standing tall above it all. The policeman, also above the fray, is barking orders at someone, but, overall, everything seems to be running fairly smoothly. Indeed, a visual walk around the frame shows a pedestrian who must have been comfortable enough to walk into the mess at the bottom and a group of people at center-left who are literally standing in front of traffic halted by the signal. They’re standing together, calmly and patiently waiting for an opportunity to cross the street on the left, clearly comfortable with the order established by the traffic signal (and, perhaps, partly by the policeman).

¶And finally, how did that guy get up there?

¶What a great photo.