The stop sign was invented in Detroit in 1914 by a police officer who cut plywood into a shape
the gist
In 1914 Detroit police sergeant Harold Jackson, directing traffic at a busy intersection where one turn was hard to see, cut a rectangle of plywood, trimmed its corners, painted STOP on it and placed it facing the street. Traffic flowed better, and the practice spread through the city and across Michigan in 1915. In 1922 a committee chose the octagon as the standard shape, because drivers could recognise it by shape even from the back and at night. Red was adopted in 1954, so a stop sign and a red light would mean the same thing. The shape was also adopted internationally by the 1968 Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals.
how it works
Shape is recognised faster than text, so the octagon signals stop even to a driver seeing the back of the sign, and its unique shape makes it identifiable in the dark.
so what
The stop sign is a reminder that a simple design choice, made to be readable at a glance, became a global standard for road safety.
fun fact
Early US stop signs were yellow with black or red lettering, because fade-resistant red materials were not yet available.
In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.
how it works
To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.
so what
A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.
the bigger pattern
Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.
fun fact
In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.
more on this
background
A Corner in Wheat is a 1909 American short silent film which tells of a greedy tycoon who tries to corner the market in wheat, destroying the lives of the people who can no longer afford to buy bread. It was directed by D. W. Griffith and adapted by Griffith and Frank E. Woods from a novel and a short story by Frank Norris, titled The Pit and "A Deal in Wheat". Griffith may have had a real-life inspiration: six months earlier, James A. Patten had actually cornered the market in wheat, and in some cities, the price of bread doubled from five cents to ten, just as in the movie.
In 1994, A Corner in Wheat was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
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