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FRASIER’S FRIDAY FACT

Volume CCXXXI

9/22/2017

Hello, Everyone!

Welcome back to Frasier's Friday Fact - the XXX Edition. No, I do not mean anything dirty there... it's just our thirtieth installment of this lovely series, and I couldn't be happier that all of us have gone on this journey to cherish knowledge and continually build our readily available mental database of useless information to use at parties together.

In fact, for the XXX Edition, I will go with something completely mundane, that we all likely see every day - the humble "STOP" sign. Its meaning is universal; the word "STOP" isn't even required for one to know what it means. This, of course, wasn't always so. In the early days of the automobile, the streets were chaotic, with horses, bicycles, cars, and pedestrians often sharing a street with no order whatsoever. Enter, in 1935, the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, my definition of exciting reading. The MUTCD governs all the signs on our streets that we often barely consciously notice - the Stop signs, chevrons around a curve, even your simple "green with white lettering" street sign.

The interesting thing here is that the Stop sign was not always red - the first MUTCD required a yellow, octagonal sign with black letters. The octagon was chosen because the theory was that the more sides the shape of a sign had, the more danger it conveyed. Thus, the most danger - a railroad crossing - is a circle, with infinite sides. The Stop sign, the second most dangerous, was given the eight sides of an octagon. We have four-sided diamond-shaped warning signs.

So why yellow? Doesn't red seem like a better color than yellow to indicate danger? Well, of course it does. Red (with white lettering) was introduced as the required color for Stop signs in the updated 1954 MUTCD. The reason that Stop signs weren't originally red was that a viable reflective sign material that would last was not developed until the late 1940s / early 1950s. And thus, we have the red Stop sign that we know, love, and occasionally ignore today.

Never STOP learning, folks.

Fraish