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IDKMYDE: Traffic Lights Started With a Disaster · The Breakfast Club

0:00
Speaker 1: Traffic lights started with a disaster.
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Speaker 2: I welcome back to it alls to another episode of
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Speaker 2: the most anticipated podcast on the Black Effect Podcast Network,
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Speaker 2: especially in February, entitled I didn't know Maybe you didn't either.
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Speaker 2: I'm your host f dot WSSU mister Alumni, twenty twenty five,
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Speaker 2: and we'll kick off this episode with three of the
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Speaker 2: most useless facts you'll never need not a day in life.
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Speaker 2: Your first useless fact, the man who invented the modern
0:33
Speaker 2: traffic lights once had to hire a white actor to
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Speaker 2: pretend to be him.
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Speaker 1: That nobody would buy from a black inventor.
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Speaker 2: Your second useless fact, that same man walked into a
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Speaker 2: tunnel filled with poisonous gas one hundred and twenty feet
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Speaker 2: under Lake Erie just to rescue dying workers while the
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Speaker 2: city of Cleveland watched.
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Speaker 1: And your third useless fact.
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Speaker 2: Four white men received Carnegie hero for the aforementioned rescue,
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Speaker 2: but he was denied. Do you know why because I
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Speaker 2: didn't I didn't know. I didn't know.
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Speaker 1: I didn't know. I didn't know. I didn't know. I
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Speaker 1: didn't I didn't know.
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Speaker 2: I didn't know.
1:16
Speaker 1: I didn't know.
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Speaker 2: All right, First, let's talk about traffic lights, because when
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Speaker 2: we think of him, we think him as boring. Neutral
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Speaker 2: always been their infrastructure. But traffic lights didn't start with order.
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Speaker 2: They started with chaos, and the man who fixed it, Bruh,
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Speaker 2: had to pretend he didn't even exist, just to sell
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Speaker 2: his own invention.
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Speaker 1: Let me tell you about Garrett Morgan.
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Speaker 2: In nineteen fourteen, Garrett Morgan invented something called the safety hood.
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Speaker 2: Now that was a breathing device that lets you survive
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Speaker 2: and smoke and toxic gas the very first breathing mass.
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Speaker 2: Pretty much problem was nobody would buy it from him
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Speaker 2: because he was black. So Garrett did some wild He
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Speaker 2: hired a white man to act like he was the inventor,
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Speaker 2: and then Morgan disguised himself. Some accounts say as big
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Speaker 2: Chief Mason from a Canadian Indian tribe. He filled a
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Speaker 2: tent with noxious smoke, strapped on his device and walked inside.
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Speaker 2: He stayed in there for nearly thirty minutes. When he
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Speaker 2: walked out alive, the crowd was stunned. Sales took off
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Speaker 2: and then came July twenty fourth, nineteen sixteen, the Cleveland.
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Speaker 1: Waterworks Tunnel disaster. Dun Dun Dyn.
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Speaker 2: Construction workers was digging a tunnel one hundred and twenty
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Speaker 2: feet under Lake Erie, four miles from the shore, and
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Speaker 2: just before midnight they hit a pocket of natural gas.
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Speaker 2: That explosion killed eleven men instantly. They sent two rescue
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Speaker 2: parties down. Ten of the eighteen rescuers died from the gas.
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Speaker 2: Nobody else would go down. At four am, the Cleveland
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Speaker 2: police called Garrett Morgan and they said, bring your hoods,
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Speaker 2: all of them. I know Garret Morgan probably thought, don't
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Speaker 2: y'all white men in Cleveland got your own hoods? But
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Speaker 2: that's a whole nother conversation could Morgan grabbed his brother Frank,
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Speaker 2: loaded twenty safety hoods in the car and drove to
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Speaker 2: the scene immediately. Then he did what nobody else would do.
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Speaker 2: He strapped on his own invention and walked into the
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Speaker 2: gas field tunnel. Him and his brother pulled out survivers,
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Speaker 2: They recovered bodies. Garrett Morgan saved more people than any
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Speaker 2: other rescuer that night. Now let me tell you where
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Speaker 2: it gets ugly. Co four white men received Carnegie Hero medals.
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Speaker 2: Derreck Morgan was denied. Why because the Carnegie Hero Fund
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Speaker 2: said that Morgan had the aid of his safety hood,
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Speaker 2: meaning he wasn't at the same extraordinary risk as the others.
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Speaker 2: His own invention was used against him. But wait, it
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Speaker 2: gets worse. Once the word spread that the safety Hoods
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Speaker 2: inventor was black, themselves dried up like salts on a slug.
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Speaker 2: But Garrett Morgan didn't stop. In nineteen twenty three, he
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Speaker 2: saw one of the worst car accidents ever and he
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Speaker 2: pattented it something else a three position traffic signal. See
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Speaker 2: before Garrett Morgan, traffic signals only had two positions, stop
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Speaker 2: and go, but Morgan added the.
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Speaker 1: Third, the all stop, that pause.
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Speaker 2: Where nobody moves that yellow light At Garrett Morgan, that
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Speaker 2: moment became the foundation of modern traffic safety, and he
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Speaker 2: sold that patent to General Electric for forty thousand dollars.
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Speaker 1: But here's the plot twists.
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Speaker 2: It took until nineteen ninety one, twenty eight years after
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Speaker 2: Garrett Morgan had died, for Cleveland the name of water
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Speaker 2: treatment plant after him. It took until twenty sixteen, one
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Speaker 2: hundred years after the disaster, for the descendants of Morgan
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Speaker 2: and the tunnel victims to meet for the first time.
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Speaker 2: His daughter Sandra Hill back Tiers at the ceremony. Traffic
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Speaker 2: lights didn't start with convenience. They started with a man
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Speaker 2: who walked into death to save strangers, then got.
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Speaker 1: Erased for doing it. And I didn't know. Maybe you
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Speaker 1: didn't either, I didn't know o