SPEAKER_01: New, immune-supporting Emergen-C crystals brings you the goodness of Emergen-C and a fun new popping experience. There is no water needed so it's super convenient, just throw it back in your mouth. Feel the pop, hear the fizz, and taste the delicious natural fruit flavors. Emergen-C crystals orange vitality and strawberry burst flavors for ages 9 and up have 500 mg of vitamin C per stick pack. Look for Emergen-C crystals wherever you shop. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at ixcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters ixcel.com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. If you've listened to the show for a while, you know that we're big fans of icons and symbols and signage, and one of the main places you encounter those is on the road. So in our ongoing ubiquitous icon series, we're taken to the highways.
SPEAKER_05: I'm thinking we should call this one highways 101. I like it. I like it.
SPEAKER_01: Highways 101. That's Kurt Kohlstedt. He's our digital director and co-author of the book, The 99% Invisible City. One of the things Kurt does is he checks our inbox for listener submitted ideas, combs to all of them. And earlier this summer, a 99 PI fan named Daniel wrote us about a strange stop sign that he encountered while traveling. And you started digging into this story.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. So, so his email started like this. A couple of years ago, we took a trip to Hawaii and my wife became obsessed over a few blue stop signs we saw in parking lots. The signs were the size and shape and use the same lettering as normal red stop signs, but they were bright blue.
SPEAKER_01: So I don't think I've ever seen that before. I had never seen this either, either in images or in real life.
SPEAKER_05: So I started looking into why some were blue and that turned out to be pretty easy to figure out, but it got me wondering something a lot more fundamental, which is why are the rest of them all red, right? Why is that such a thing in the first place? Totally. Yeah. And that got me into, of course, digging into the whole history of stop signs.
SPEAKER_01: Of course. Of course. That's the only way this is going to go with you. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: It's just my nature. And as I was looking into this, this one figure kept popping up everywhere I looked, a guy named William Phelps Eno, who in the early 1900s became known as the father of traffic safety.
SPEAKER_01: Oh, okay. So what do you have to do to earn that title? The father of traffic safety.
SPEAKER_05: So Eno was born way back in the 1850s. And if you think about it, you know, 1850s is in New York. This is a New York without cars. So of course it's a New York without stop signs. Stop signs.
SPEAKER_01: Totally. Yeah. The roads back then were kind of this open space that was shared by carriages and pedestrians and they moved all around. It was a lot different.
SPEAKER_05: Right. Right. And there was like some attempts to do some traffic management and stuff, but it was all kind of ad hoc and like, you know, people standing in the street and it wasn't very organized. It all got worse, right? As more technologies evolved and more and more people were on the streets and you know, cars started showing up and it just was increasingly clear that this was a mess and it was going to need some kind of regulation.
SPEAKER_01: And so was Eno some kind of road expert? Is that what he was working on? Well, that's the thing.
SPEAKER_05: Not really. He came from this family real estate business, decided it wasn't for him. It wasn't his passion. His passion was traffic. So in 1900 he writes this article and it's not entirely clear in hindsight if he realized what he was doing at the time, but he basically was writing a treatise that would lay the groundwork for everything he would do for the rest of his life. So in the end he would come around to, you know, inventing and evolving all different kinds of traffic innovations, things we take for granted today, like rotary junctions and pedestrian crossing.
SPEAKER_01: Wow. So he really earned that title, the father of traffic safety. Absolutely. And once his ideas got some traction in the US, he began helping other cities create traffic
SPEAKER_05: plans and some really recognizable designs trace back to him, like roundabouts at Piccadilly circus in London and around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. And he was even inducted into the Legion of Honor by the French government after World War I.
SPEAKER_01: For traffic. Yes. That's where he got that.
SPEAKER_05: Wow. He essentially got, you know, France's equivalent of a knighthood for traffic design. But if you think about it from their perspective, his traffic designs helped get French troops to the front lines, which in turn helped them hold off the Germans during the war. France is pushing like 60,000 troops towards Verdun to halt the German advance towards Paris. It was all made possible by this guy's traffic planning.
SPEAKER_01: And so was Eno the man who invented the stop sign?
SPEAKER_05: Well, that's the thing. I kind of fell down this rabbit hole looking into him. But one thing I realized along the way was that I was never going to find the inventor of the stop sign. Because it's one of those things that has existed in various forms for a while now. But it's safe to say that Eno played a really big role in popularizing stop signs and yield signs and that kind of signage infrastructure. And that's why his name comes up so much when you're looking into these things. And also, you know, put this in context, right? Stop signs back then, they weren't what we think of as stop signs today. Their designs varied from place to place. One of the first ones that popped up in Detroit in I think it was 1915 had black lettering on a white background, presumably for contrast. So they really they came in all these different shapes and sizes. And there was no sort of one person you could say, aha, that guy made the stop sign. Yeah, I mean, I think that makes sense to me that there would be a need for stop signs
SPEAKER_01: and therefore they would be invented in multiple places and multiple times. So when did they sort of get this octagonal shape that we attribute to them? Like when did that happen?
SPEAKER_05: Right. So that one actually does have a specific answer. And the answer is 1923. That's when the Mississippi Valley Association of State Highway Departments decided to standardize the shape.
SPEAKER_01: That's a very specific answer. Yeah. And it was a pretty good idea to make it a non-standard shape, something that would stand
SPEAKER_05: out. But there was actually more to it than that. They had this idea that they could create an association between geometry and safety.
SPEAKER_01: Explain more what you mean there.
SPEAKER_05: Well, they believed that the shape itself could communicate something like part of what the sign was trying to do could be achieved through the shape of that sign.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so we're not talking about just associating a rare shape with a specific meaning. There's some kind of theory behind eight having a meaning that ties to stopping. Yes. And this was a huge surprise to me.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, because it sounds like nonsense.
SPEAKER_01: It sounds right. It sounds sort of occult almost, right?
SPEAKER_05: Totally. But I found it. I found this out through this New York Times Magazine article by Hillary Greenbaum and Dana Rubinstein. And I'm just going to have you read this excerpt for context that explains why the Highway Departments Association recommended different shapes for different signs.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, here it is. Quote, the recommendations were based on a simple, albeit not exactly intuitive idea. The more sides a sign has, the higher the danger level it invokes. By the engineer's reckoning, the circle, which has an infinite number of sides, screamed danger and was recommended for railroad crossings. The octagon with its eight sides was used to denote the second highest level. The diamond shape was for warning signs, and the rectangle and square shapes were used for informational signs. End quote. That is just wild. It really is, right? I mean, there's so many things that I have, so many questions I have about this. One of which is like, does a circle really have an infinite number of sides? Yeah, so I'm thinking back to like, you know, grade school geometry.
SPEAKER_05: And I'm like, I think that there's something to that. I think it's like, yeah, if you take the tangent of each point and therefore it has an infinite
SPEAKER_01: number of sides, but I don't think people perceive it as having infinite numbers. I think they perceive it as having one side. Right.
SPEAKER_05: So we look at a circle, a square and a triangle and we say, aha, right. Three, four and infinite. It never in a million years occurred to me that there was some grand geometric theory behind US stop sign shapes. But if you think about it, if you start to unpack it and you look at signs around you, you can sort of understand what they're getting at, right? It's like, well, yeah, rectangular signs often tell you like what exit to take or something. There's circles at railroad crossings. Sure.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but there's also like arm bars at railroad crossings, you know, like because the circle is not quite enough sometimes. There's also X's and all kinds of other things. So I get that there's a theory behind it and if it has some kind of basis and semiotics, I'm willing to entertain that notion. So now that, you know, in 1923 in Mississippi, they established the shape. How did they come up with the red background?
SPEAKER_05: Well that might seem like the simpler decision. That would actually took a while longer. At the time, yellow was often used in part just for material science reasons. Like they couldn't get a really good reflective durable red. And so yellow showed up well at night. So for decades that was the general standard. And then in the 1950s, they made red the official stand. Okay.
SPEAKER_01: So yellow because you can make kind of a matte yellow and it contrasts really well with black, for example, when it looks really good at night. But until you get that shiny red that you see on a stop sign, red is not a very good stop sign color.
SPEAKER_05: Right. And if you think about like when you see a red stop sign at night, it is really shiny and really reflective. And also by that time too, you know, we've got stoplights and other signage and red has really got this built up association of being a thing telling you to stop. So making them red just kind of fit with the grander scheme of everything else that was going on at the time.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. And it's a warning color in nature. I suppose yellow is too, but yeah, it makes, it makes sense. So how does this get us to those blue stop signs in Hawaii that Daniel found? Oh, right. And that's how we come full circle or a full octagon.
SPEAKER_05: And it turns out the blue painted stop signs are actually exceptional on purpose. You usually find them on private property, places like store parking lots. And the reason they're blue is so they won't be confused with other official government red signs. That makes sense.
SPEAKER_01: So they're like intentional fakes because they don't want it to seem like it's a sign maintained by the city or county. So they're like mall cops. They have a badge. They might have a gun, but they're not actual cops. Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_05: Like whether you actually decide to pay attention to what the sign's telling you is a little bit up to you, but it is really clear what it's trying to tell you. Right?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. I mean, that's one of the things I think that's so great about the stop sign is that with the shape, the word stop and the color, you can really take one or two of those elements. And at this point it'll convey the meaning. Like if you had a red octagon with no word stop on it, I think people would generally stop.
SPEAKER_05: Right. Or if you saw you know, an octagon from behind, you'll know that that's a stop sign. Other people have to stop.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's a, you know, that's a good sign. So they were onto something in Mississippi in 1923 and they figured something out. That's that's so cool. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: Well, there we go. Yeah. And I actually have another blue sign for you. Um, this one is actually not so much of an exception as the rule.
SPEAKER_01: So a blue sign, but not a stop sign. So what, which one are you talking about?
SPEAKER_05: Right. So the one, the ones I'm talking about are these big rectangular, super recognizable ones that if you've ever driven between cities, you have seen one of these, they're those big blue signs that tell you which businesses are at which exits. Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_01: When you're traveling, these are the greatest signs ever because this is where you get to check out. Like if there's like an In-N-Out burger exit or you have to keep going because there's nothing good to eat. Exactly.
SPEAKER_05: Like they're super easy to recognize, you know, you know what they look like, you know what they're telling you and they're generally called specific service signs. And there are actually three different types of them. And one of the ones is the one that you just mentioned, which is the mainline sign. And that tells you where to get off for what. And then there are these smaller ramp signs that you see when you drive up the off ramp. And then there are these smaller trailblazer signs and all of these are designed to route you to the exact place you're trying to get.
SPEAKER_01: Right. And so I've always kind of wondered like how those signs work. I mean, who gets to be on them? Because not every business at the exit is on one and they really do serve as your guide to the road. So how does that all happen?
SPEAKER_05: They're pretty standard looking from state to state, but the details of how they work can vary quite a lot. But the big idea is that businesses have to meet certain criteria to get a spot on these signs. So for example, they may need to be open a certain number of hours per day and days per week and weeks per year. They might have to have a certain minimum capacity for patrons, a certain number of seats and bathrooms, a certain number of parking spots. And these requirements can get really specific. Like restaurants in Kentucky have to be open and serve water from 7am to 10pm. Oh, wow.
SPEAKER_01: Okay. So that's actually really great so that you'd know that there's a basic level of service. And so do you get on the sign if you meet those requirements basically?
SPEAKER_05: Well it depends. It depends in part on demand. In some places businesses have to get at the back of a line basically and wait to get their spot on the sign. They also have to develop versions of their logos that fit within the dimensions of the box, which are of course standardized on the sign. And then depending upon the location and the size of the sign and the type of sign, you might actually have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars a year to get a prime placement on one of these.
SPEAKER_01: Wow. So it really is like a paid advertisement after all.
SPEAKER_05: It is, but there's some more nuance to it too. Like in Oregon, there are discounts for nonprofit organizations that want space on a sign. And in California, some of the sign revenue gets set aside and put towards creating and maintaining rest areas, which is a really nice public service. Some of us are just geeks and we like learning about these things. But for people who are on the road a lot, this is really useful information. You know when you look at the sign, if you know the rules for the state, you know what to expect from the stop. That the businesses there will offer certain things and be open at certain times and be within a certain distance of the exit. And all of that's really handy if you're somebody who spends a lot of time on the road.
SPEAKER_01: Right. And if you're really thirsty in Kentucky, you know if you see a restaurant on that sign, you can pull over and get a drink of water.
SPEAKER_05: That's right. But only for 14 hours a day.
SPEAKER_01: So we're going to pull off the freeway and the big blue signs onto kind of a rural route highway for our next ubiquitous icon. And this is really kind of not so much an icon is an object that became an icon. And it is the mailbox. And it's the specific kind of mailbox. It's that metal flat bottom rounded top, little red flag on the side. If you live in the U.S., you've definitely seen one of these. You raise or lower the flag if you have outgoing mail. I mean, this thing is truly ubiquitous. Right.
SPEAKER_05: And even if you don't live in the U.S., you know what they look like because you've seen them in graphic format. You've seen them in pictures. These things became a digital icon a long time ago. But in terms of the physical box, well, it's a pretty simple and elegant solution. But it grew out of this really long history of problems that the United States Postal Service was having. And it didn't actually come out until 1915. But to understand it, we have to go back another half century or so to 1863. And that's the year that the USPS introduced free city delivery.
SPEAKER_01: So I think of the U.S. Postal Service as having universal access so that you get mail delivered no matter where you are. We did a whole episode about that sort of thing.
SPEAKER_05: Right. Right. But universal access doesn't mean universal access to mail at your front door. And that was the sort of key innovation that created a little bit of a rift between city dwellers and people who didn't live in cities.
SPEAKER_01: Oh, so people who lived in cities because they're close together, they got their mail delivered to their door. But people who lived out in the country did not get that luxury. Right.
SPEAKER_05: Right. And it makes sense, right? They can go door to door much more easily in the city than they can in the country. And so this was a big boon to people who were living in cities. But if you think about when we are, you know, in the 1800s, most people aren't living in urban areas at this point. They're all spread out. And so the standard practice was that they would go to their local post office if they wanted to pick up or send mail.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. Which is why you see all of these like really beautiful little rural post offices around. Like I subscribe to a Twitter account that just shows you pictures of them. I really love them.
SPEAKER_05: I love it. No, me too. I love these tiny little post offices of all shapes and sizes. But of course, if you're thinking about it from a practical standpoint, all these people living out in the countryside aren't totally thrilled that they're paying the same postage rates as people in the city, but aren't getting the same level of service, right? They're not getting this door to door service like city dwellers are.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I can imagine them getting pretty upset with that. So how did this tension eventually resolve?
SPEAKER_05: Right. So finally in 1896, the USPS starts testing out rural free delivery. That solved some problems and created others because suddenly farmers and other people living outside of cities were just cobbling together mailboxes from whatever was handy, like lard cans and feed crates and cigar boxes. And basically they just would take anything that was box like and pick it up and nail it to a post. I love it.
SPEAKER_01: I do too, honestly. I can imagine that being a bit of a pain because you have to figure out like if you're a postal carrier, like is this thing nailed to a post a mailbox or is it something else or is it like a peach basket for basketball, for example? Right, right. And everyone, you know, they might open differently.
SPEAKER_05: Like, you know, there's no standardization here. And so the USPS ends up having to impose standards and they started requiring boxes be purpose built for mail that they be made of metal resistant to snow and rain, have some kind of flag or signal to indicate that there's outgoing mail inside. And of course they be high up enough that they could be reached from vehicles. And on top of all of that, they also had to meet certain size dimensions because of course mail has to actually fit in these things.
SPEAKER_01: So that pretty much describes the mailbox we're talking about. So what if you didn't comply? Like what if, what would happen if you, you just kept your lard can posted up?
SPEAKER_05: Well you got a warning and that warning was that your service will get cut off if you don't get a compliant box. And then you got instructions as to where you can get a compliant box. And there were a dozen or so models that the USPS had vetted and said, okay, these are suitable for mail. Okay.
SPEAKER_01: Well, that sounds like a good start. Like, I mean, if it's not too onerous or too expensive, like at least they have a few options.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah. So it was a, it was a step in the right direction but it also caused some other side effects. One of which was a conflict of interest because suddenly, you know, people would ask their mail carriers, well, which box should I get? And companies figured out, Oh, Hey, we could pay these mail carriers a commission to suggest our box. So suddenly there is this kind of perverse incentive for mail carriers to, you know, talk different boxes and that wasn't going to work for the USPS.
SPEAKER_01: Totally. Oh, they were taking kickbacks. Oh, I'm so disappointed. Yeah. Right. So like, what did they do to, to solve that problem?
SPEAKER_05: Well, basically in the end they said, okay, no, no more of this kind of picking out from a list or whatever. The USPS just turned inward to somebody who was already on staff, a guy named Roy and they said, Roy, make a box. And he made a box and not just any box. He made one that was basically open source, a design that any company could legally take and make. And so this took the competitive aspect out of the equation. So there were still different companies building the boxes, but there wasn't any real incentive for somebody to recommend one option over the others because they all had the same design.
SPEAKER_01: That's so cool. It was so forward thinking of the time to make it open source. So, so how did Roy come up with this, you know, perfect mailbox design that's become the icon of today? Well, a lot of ways he built on what was already there, these guidelines that the USPS had
SPEAKER_05: set out, but he also focused on making them simple and cheap so that anybody could afford one. So his box has this arch top to prevent snow and water from accumulating and the curve shape also made mass production easier because it turns out wrapping a curve is easier than precisely bending metal. And then there's that classic front latch, which helps protect the mail inside. So in the end, he took all of these criteria and he made this thing that was functional and durable and inexpensive and used as few moving parts as possible. Like you just followed the brief and was a great designer, it sounds like.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. Fantastic. So I tend to see these more out in the country. I'm sure I've seen them in cities too, and especially in suburbs. So they really weren't just for rural delivery. They really became the mailbox.
SPEAKER_05: Right. And that's in part because of this open source aspect because the design had no patent. Any company could just make them. And because they worked well, a lot of companies did just that. And it also didn't hurt that the USPS mandated that people use these boxes in rural areas for a while. It wasn't until the late 70s, actually, that they started to relax their restrictions and let people use a variety of box types.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, because I definitely have seen other ones. I just see this one a lot. That's really outstanding. That explains why. I guess one of the reasons why it's been so reinforced is that this design has definitely gone digital. You see a profile of that type of box, the rounded top, the little red flag. You know what that means. That means mail.
SPEAKER_05: Oh, yeah. Yeah. There's even an emoji called closed mailbox with red flag. And it is absolutely super obviously based on that classic design that was made over a century ago. That's so great.
SPEAKER_01: So do we know Roy's last name?
SPEAKER_05: I believe it's Jorleman. I'm not sure I'm pronouncing that entirely right. So we might want to check that before we air it. But yeah, I believe it is Jorleman. Let's just live a little. I just like the idea of Roy the mail guy sitting there designing his box.
SPEAKER_01: Our hero for today is Roy, who worked at the USPS and made that mailbox that we all know and love.
SPEAKER_05: Let's all raise a little mail flag to that guy.
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely. When we come back, another thing that you've definitely seen along the highways and freeways, those little dots that light the way after this.
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SPEAKER_01: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Your thoughts are just racing around. I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible. So we're back with another story. And this one we actually included in the book, The 99% Invisible City, so I actually know it ahead of time. And it concerns those reflective markers that you see, you know, along the side of roads or between lanes. There's lots of different kinds, there's lots of different places around the world that they exist. But the most interesting character we discovered, who worked on a very early version of these, was a British inventor named Percy Shaw. And with a lot of great origin stories, the details of Percy's breakthrough, they kind of vary depending on who's telling the story, but they all have this one thing in common. It started with him driving along a narrow road on a foggy night in the early 1900s near his hometown of Halifax.
SPEAKER_05: And as his brother told the story, Percy was coming home from one of his usual haunts, a local pub. But as he drove around this sharp corner, he saw the reflective eyes of a cat alongside the road. And because he saw that cat, he avoided driving his car off of a cliff and crashing and probably dying.
SPEAKER_01: So normally Percy didn't rely on, you know, good fortune and cats crossing his path to stay on the road. He relied on tram lines in the road. They were like the metal reflection from the tracks of trams. He would use those to orient himself on the road, but they had been ripped up. And so he was stuck kind of squinting through the fog. And that's when it came to him that he would invent a way to solve this problem for himself and other drivers and not rely on cats.
SPEAKER_05: And it was very much in his nature. Percy had always been a fixer and a tinkerer from a young age. And he actually left school at the age of 13 to help his family make money. And he ended up starting a paving business. And then finally in 1934, he patented this device that would reshape the roads of England and then eventually go global.
SPEAKER_01: So his design involved a pair of reflective glass beads embedded in a cast iron frame. These retro reflective cat's eyes, they redirected the light back towards the cars with minimal scattering so you really could see them. They stood out in the dark night and they were really sophisticated. Like the metal part projected the glass, but it also lowered when cars drove over in both for safety reasons and to create a noise. They alerted the drivers with the noise. And probably my favorite detail though, is that these little rubber wipers were added later. So basically when the housing got pushed down, the glass would wipe up against the wipers. And so the device was self-cleaning.
SPEAKER_05: All of this is really sophisticated. So it may be obvious, but Shaw didn't invent these overnight, right? He tried out all these different designs and he iterated on them. And one of my favorite parts of the story is how he approached this design development process. So instead of getting approval and, you know, having authorities sign off on him testing them out, he just went out and started adding his various prototypes to local roads.
SPEAKER_01: The good old days. I mean, he did own a paving company, so he just would start ripping up the roads and he would try out different designs. He was perfectly suited to doing this, just not quite legally allowed.
SPEAKER_05: But even then he had another problem too, which is that once he got this design together, he couldn't seem to find buyers until the second world war came along. And suddenly there are wartime blackouts because of air raids. So nights are darker than ever. Drivers have been instructed to add dimmers to their headlamps and do other things to reduce their visibility on the road. And so accidents are happening and the government responds at first by painting white lines on the roads and on posts to help people see at night. And then, you know, suddenly Percy, who's been asking to get an audience with the government to see if they're interested, has these cat's eyes that are just perfect, right? They use the illumination from cars to light up so they don't have like an independent source of light that would attract attention from the skies and the next thing you know, the government is buying like 40,000 of these things a week.
SPEAKER_01: And to some extent, I mean, this is where the design spread internationally. So you know, the other places, they also came up with their own and different solutions to fit their regional needs. Like here in California, which is a huge state and there are lots of climate ranges. There's like hot and sunny places, there's cold and snowy places. You need to use different markers in different places in different times. And some reflectors are recessed into mountain roads, for example, so they don't get scraped up by plows. So there's lots of things you have to work on. And so these things have been iterated and have different origins depending on where you are in the world. Right.
SPEAKER_05: And if you think about Percy's cat's eyes too, you know, that was one of the things that made them work so well in Britain. It's like Britain is foggy and rainy and so these wipers were particularly useful. So in a way they were sort of, you know, they could be universal, but they also were very site specific as a solution. But no matter where you go, there is this type that's more common than any other. And it's basically just a trapezoid, right? It's got a ramp up on one side, a sort of flat top and then a ramp down on the other side.
SPEAKER_01: Right. So you can see it in the two different directions, depending on which way you're going down the road. And it's not just the trapezoid shape that's used in a lot of different places. A lot of the colors are pretty common too. So here in the U S for example, it's really common to have a white reflectors to divide lanes and yellow reflectors on the, on the edge of the road. But also there's a, there's some variations there too. So like you can have greens and blues. They indicate things, you know, that are on the side of the road. So pull off stops for cops can have a different color and like locations for fire hydrants to signal firefighters are also a different color. Right.
SPEAKER_05: And I love the fact that you don't typically notice the color differences. Like you see the reflectors, but some of them are like queued in to tell different groups about what they can find. And then there's this other neat function that they can serve too, because of their trapezoidal shape, they can have different colors facing different directions. So for example a reflector can have white on one side and that tells you, you know, you're going the right way and then it can have red on the other side, which lets you know that you're going the wrong way, very much going the wrong way. It should probably just stop your car, maybe turn around slowly. If there's one lesson from this, from this show, it's that if you see red, maybe stop.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe stop. Consider stopping.
SPEAKER_05: Blue also sometimes, but not always. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: So in the book we go over all these different details and we talk about different designs and we found in different places, but you know, we really tell the story through Percy Shaw.
SPEAKER_05: And in the end, Percy became something of a local legend in Halifax. There's this plaque affixed to his old house and his design won a bunch of design awards, but he never really seemed to care about all that stuff. And he did travel for work, but he preferred to mostly stay close to home. And one of the few ways that you can actually tell he'd become this kind of rich and influential guy was this Rolls Royce Phantom. And people would tell stories about him, you know, riding around in it, driven by his chauffeur and often just traveling to and from his favorite pub along those very same roads that inspired him to create this thing that made him famous in the first place.
SPEAKER_01: So there you have it. That's just one story of over a hundred that we have in the book. And in the 99% invisible city, we have illustrations of all these things too, including Percy's cat's eyes and a variation called Bot's dots, which are really common in California and those trapezoidal reflectors that we talked about as well. And this is definitely the kind of story you can expect from the upcoming book in general. You know, like we talk about specific designs and places and characters and all the ideas and lessons and histories that are specific to a place, but also have global implications and global meaning.
SPEAKER_05: Exactly. And while you're waiting for your copy of said book, I've also been writing up a bunch of articles about how the book was made and been answering a lot of questions people have asked. And, you know, I've been gathering some, some process materials from our illustrator, Patrick Vale and our designer, Raphael Geroni. And so I've been assembling these into some, some neat surprises and sort of behind the scenes pieces about how we made the book, because of course we're a design show. So we're not only interested in talking about design in the book, but we're also interested in talking about the design of the book.
SPEAKER_01: And some of the process, the iterations that Raphael went through when he was working on the cover, for example, are super fascinating. I even forgot some of the different versions that he did and the pictures, the drawings that are so cool. You should definitely check them out. They're all at 99pi.org. And if you want to order the book directly, you just have to go to 99pi.org slash book. All right. Thanks, Kurt.
SPEAKER_05: Thank you so much, Roman. It's been a blast.
SPEAKER_01: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Kurt Kohlstedt with help from Emmett Fitzgerald, music by Sean Rial. Delaney Hall is our senior producer. The rest of the team includes Vivien Leigh, Chris Berube, Joe Rosenberg, Katie Mingle, Abby Madone, Sophia Klatsker, Christopher Johnson, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, which is basically in our houses and apartments all around the country, but in our hearts will always be in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We are a proud member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative listener supported podcasts in the world. Find them all at radio topia.fm. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org or on Instagram and Reddit too. You can pre-order the 99% Invisible city at 99pi.org slash book. We still have a few signed copies and a few coins available. Check out all the details at 99pi.org slash book. And for all your other 99 PI needs, look no further than 99pi.org. Radio Topia from PRX.
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SPEAKER_04: Let's get you taken care of. When the weather app says rain, the McDonald's app says McDelivery. Order McDelivery in the McDonald's app. I participate in McDonald's delivery prices may be higher than at restaurants.
SPEAKER_03: Delivery fees may apply.
SPEAKER_04: Welcome back to our studio where we have a special guest with us today, Toucan Sam from Fruit Loops. Toucan Sam, welcome.
SPEAKER_03: It's my pleasure to be here. Oh, and it's Fruit Loops, just so you know. Fruit? Fruit. Yeah, fruit. No, it's Fruit Loops. The same way you say studio.
SPEAKER_04: That's not how we say it.
SPEAKER_03: Fruit Loops. Find the loopy side.
