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August 5, 1914. On a street corner in Cleveland, Ohio, the very first electric traffic light in America switched on, and the way we move through cities was changed forever. Cars were still fairly new, and city streets were becoming chaos. Automobiles, horse drawn wagons, streetcars, and pedestrians were all jockeying for space with no real system to keep them from smashing into each other. Traffic was getting dangerous and confusing, and something had to give. The solution installed on this day used red and green electric lights to tell drivers when to stop and when to go, and it even had a buzzer to warn when the signal was about to change. It seems almost quaint now, but it was a genuinely new idea, imposing order on the free for all of the streets. From that single corner in Cleveland, the concept spread everywhere. Today there are countless traffic lights in virtually every town and city on Earth, quietly directing the flow of billions of trips. That entire global system of red means stop and green means go traces back to one intersection that lit up on this day.