Older Than deck / Inventions and everyday things
Traffic light
First installed
1868
London’s first one was gas-lit and worked by a police officer, decades before cars.
Sources and checks
Checked 2026-10-19: Claude (AI build agent): Wikidata statement compared, passages containing the year extracted from the fetched pages and read. Quotes are short passages from each source, in their original language.
Wikidata P571: 1868Q8004, CC0, retrieved 2026-10-19
“for å regulere hestetrafikken og redusere antall trafikkulykker i London . Verdens første trafikklys ble satt opp 9. desember 1868 nær Westminster Bridge i London, i krysset mellom Great George Street og Bridge”Store norske leksikon (in Norwegian): source, retrieved 2026-10-19“første trafiklys til regulering af trafikken på veje blev udviklet på basis af erfaringer fra jernbanerne og sat i drift i 1868 i et vejkryds på Bridge Street i London. En politibetjent drejede grønne eller røde”Lex (Den Store Danske) (in Danish): source, retrieved 2026-10-19
Spotted a mistake? Tell us; a correction gets a new revision.