17 Facts About Lester Wire

Lester Farnsworth Wire was an American police officer and inventor.

Lester Wire is credited with the invention of the electric traffic light in 1912.

Lester Wire continued to work on traffic light designs throughout his life, and later fully redesigned his traffic light using a metal frame.

Lester Wire never patented his traffic lights, and by the 1960s both of the original models had been lost.

Lester Wire was born on September 3,1887, in Salt Lake City, Utah, to Frank and Lida Wire.

Lester Wire attended Salt Lake High School, where he was a football star and helped create the first high school men's and women's basketball teams.

Lester Wire joined the Salt Lake City Police Department in 1910.

In that position, Lester Wire created the first traffic codes in Salt Lake City, although the public was divided on accepting them.

Lester Wire managed the officers sent to respond to traffic incidents and direct traffic at the city's busy intersections.

Concerned about his officers' working conditions, and realizing traffic and intersections in the city would continue to outnumber and overwhelm anyone trying to manage them alone, Lester Wire sought to devise a better and safer way to control traffic.

Lester Wire's first prototype was a yellow wooden box with a pitched roof that contained red and green lights on all four sides.

Lester Wire dipped the bulbs in red and green paint to get their color as opposed to using colored glass; these colors were chosen for familiarity, as they were already being used for similar purposes as nautical lights and railway signals.

However, it became apparent over time that Lester Wire's traffic light was an invaluable tool, and more motorists became used to the presence of traffic lights on Salt Lake City's roads, while local companies, seeing an untapped market in the new invention, began producing traffic lights of their own.

Lester Wire enlisted in the American Expeditionary Forces in 1917 as an ambulance driver, survived World War I, and returned to Salt Lake City in 1919, by which point many other American cities had adopted traffic lights of their own.

Lester Wire attempted to regain his position in the SLCPD as the Traffic Bureau's sergeant, but the officer who took his position did not wish to give it up, so Wire instead returned to regular patrol and, on January 8,1920, joined the Detective Bureau.

Lester Wire did not file a patent for his electric traffic light after inventing it, though he reportedly considered doing so.

Lester Wire died of a heart attack on April 14,1958, at the age of 70.