Yellow Makes You Hungry

[00:00] Last thing on the plate, Mr. Coalson, I think we have an under-googlable.
[00:05] We do under-googlables.
[00:13] That was the play of it.
[00:14] Super excited.
[00:15] You told us we had to, sir.
[00:17] You said we signed up for it.
[00:23] In the end, it's going to be better and more true than Google can give you.
[00:27] We do.
[00:28] I was thinking about this on my drive home tonight.
[00:35] Why is red universally stop and green universally go?
[00:42] Now let me start by saying to super fan of the show and art professor,
[00:51] Jennifer Drinkwater, that I know that red and green are contrasting colors.
[00:56] And so I assume that one of these decisions was made either stop is red or green is go.
[01:04] And then the other one became to mean the opposite.
[01:09] But I don't know which one came first and when it came about.
[01:13] Sure.
[01:14] So I don't feel like the I feel like this goes back further than the psychology of color.
[01:22] You know, like they they say that yellow makes you hungry and light green makes you smart or something.
[01:29] And light blue makes you sleepy.
[01:31] I don't know.
[01:31] They've done all these studies and they paint rooms to make you feel different ways.
[01:37] And I assume that this that this did not come from that.
[01:41] I feel like this predates that.
[01:45] That's a safe bet.
[01:46] Yes.
[01:49] So, you know, when did somebody come up with a not stop light or stop sign?
[01:55] Right.
[01:57] And this was was in would this be the invention of cars?
[02:02] Did stop signs exist in different forms before cars showed up?
[02:08] Yeah.
[02:08] These are the questions I have.
[02:12] Definitely.
[02:12] So the I think the first real stop sign would probably be a lighthouse.
[02:18] Okay.
[02:20] But that wasn't red.
[02:22] You like crap on fire.
[02:24] That's right.
[02:26] Fair enough.
[02:27] All right.
[02:28] Yeah.
[02:28] So you think that's where it comes from?
[02:30] You think it's it's it's don't hit this rock because we're going to we're
[02:33] going to light this fire and it's red because you sort of think of it as orange
[02:36] really a fire maybe or blue or white depending on how far away you are from
[02:41] it or whatever or how hot it's running.
[02:45] Well, I'm not thinking about electric driven White House is I'm thinking
[02:49] about like Athenian.
[02:50] No, no, I know.
[02:51] But what I'm saying is a fire itself like depending on how hot it's
[02:54] burning can be different colors, right?
[02:57] I usually think of it as white or orange and not red.
[03:01] Sure.
[03:04] Okay, that's all that was my own.
[03:07] I'm not trying to shoot your idea down right away, but I'm shooting your idea
[03:10] down right away.
[03:11] Yeah, I mean, I think it's definitely nautical.
[03:14] Okay, I mean to this to this day like port and starboard are marked by
[03:20] red and green, right?
[03:21] So if you've got boat running lights, I believe that
[03:26] I was confused port and starboard, but believe starboard is red and
[03:34] port is great, but that don't import would be going forward.
[03:39] I know it's right and left basically, right?
[03:41] So you keep clearly I've done a lot of sailing in my day.
[03:45] Yeah.
[03:45] Yeah.
[03:46] No, it's been a few years for me to being you know, I just you
[03:50] know completely wealthy and never having to work.
[03:52] It's nice to just yacht for a living.
[03:55] Well, now if if if greens on right and Reds on left or vice versa,
[04:01] how do I know?
[04:01] So would I turn the boat to tell people to stop?
[04:04] I don't know.
[04:05] Well, so running lights on boats like you have bow basically your
[04:08] bow comes to a point, right?
[04:10] Right.
[04:11] And so on one side, there's a green light and one side, there's a
[04:14] red so you can tell which side of a boat you're looking at the
[04:16] dark, right, right?
[04:18] If it's coming if you can see both is coming right at you and
[04:20] you're in trouble.
[04:21] Okay, fair enough.
[04:23] Yeah, yeah, I like that.
[04:24] So let me see.
[04:25] So if you're going into port red, right return, right?
[04:28] So, okay, keep the red on your right when you're going back
[04:32] into port like that's a nautical thing.
[04:34] Okay, and I assume that the red came.
[04:38] I assume that the red came from lighthouses because those
[04:42] are like the first major points of navigation and I think
[04:45] that you're right.
[04:46] I think that that green is the contrast, right?
[04:50] So what's the opposite color of red because right be the
[04:53] most opposite visually, right?
[04:58] And also you don't want, you know, you need a brighter color
[05:01] than like blue, right?
[05:03] Right.
[05:04] You need navigable things at night.
[05:07] Sure.
[05:08] So okay, but at this point you're so these light runners
[05:12] on ships.
[05:12] So at what point did we have like oil lamps with red covers
[05:18] on them and green covers on them?
[05:20] Like did they have filaments for these things?
[05:22] Like how far back can we go with the actual coloring of light
[05:27] on this stuff on the boats?
[05:29] You see what I'm saying?
[05:31] I mean, that's a good question.
[05:33] I think I think that probably came around with electricity.
[05:35] I mean, I just don't think that there's enough water traffic
[05:38] to merit such a complex system.
[05:40] I mean, I think that I would have thought anyway that most
[05:45] of the time.
[05:46] Well, I don't know because you think about like navies used
[05:49] to go in formation, right?
[05:52] Like, you know, you got the Spanish Armada, right?
[05:55] Right.
[05:56] If you're traveling at night.
[05:59] How do you know where you are relative to other ships?
[06:01] I just assumed oil lamps.
[06:05] And maybe that's enough, right?
[06:07] Maybe that is enough.
[06:08] Yeah.
[06:10] Again, I guess my point is I don't really think of fire
[06:14] as red.
[06:16] Like if I have fire in a lighthouse, I don't just see
[06:20] that as red.
[06:21] I see that as as light as white or orange or yellow.
[06:29] Now coals, I think of as red.
[06:31] But and maybe maybe that's where it comes from.
[06:34] Like red means hot.
[06:35] Don't touch it.
[06:37] You know, strike why the iron is hot.
[06:39] I don't know.
[06:41] That's a different saying.
[06:43] But you know, I mean, I think there's something to that.
[06:46] I think idiomatically.
[06:47] There's always, you know.
[06:51] We associate red, not just with stop of danger.
[06:56] Yeah.
[06:57] And that may pre, I mean, I'm sure that that predates stop signs.
[07:02] Red peppers are hotter than green peppers.
[07:04] I don't know.
[07:10] Okay, so.
[07:15] I guess I'm curious about the evolution of how let's say
[07:19] it is nautical how that got transferred to how someone was
[07:24] like, yeah, universally, let's just do this.
[07:26] Because like, you know, if you're in Europe, the stop signs
[07:30] are red as well, you know, like, it's not just American
[07:35] stop signs.
[07:37] Right.
[07:38] I mean, the question at that point becomes who were the
[07:42] first people to start doing signage and lights.
[07:45] And I suspect that was America.
[07:47] Yeah, we had Thomas Edison.
[07:50] Well, not only Thomas Edison, but also Henry Ford, right?
[07:54] Yeah, we had enough traffic, right to warrant because none
[07:58] of this stuff matters if there's nothing to hit, right?
[08:00] And so you have other vehicles that there's risk of collision.
[08:04] These things aren't necessarily that important.
[08:06] Sure.
[08:06] If you're just riding around in the forest on a horse,
[08:09] you know, like whatever, you're probably good.
[08:11] Right.
[08:14] To your point about the psychological thing, I think
[08:17] there is something sort of ominous about red.
[08:21] Red is the color of blood, for instance.
[08:23] Okay, okay.
[08:25] And and so there may be something that underlies it
[08:28] that like red is red has been danger.
[08:32] For as long as people bled.
[08:35] Yeah, right.
[08:36] I mean, you know, if you were going to write a really
[08:38] ominous letter to someone like a true threat back in the
[08:41] day, you probably wrote in their blood.
[08:43] Right, sure.
[08:44] Right.
[08:45] Or in someone's blood.
[08:46] Like that's super scary.
[08:47] That happens in, you know, Dracula movies.
[08:49] I don't know that ever happened in real life, but I
[08:51] assume it has.
[08:52] Well, and green is, is, you know, plant life and growth.
[08:57] Yeah, it's earthy, right?
[08:58] Yeah, yeah, yeah, less scary.
[09:02] Mm-hmm.
[09:04] So I probably is an aspect of it to that.
[09:07] Are you going?
[09:11] We're not putting filaments on on lamps on ships.
[09:14] So it's got to be later than that, right?
[09:19] Oil lamps.
[09:20] It's got to be later than oil lamps.
[09:23] You're saying it's the invention of the motor vehicle
[09:28] where they decide.
[09:28] So I mean for lights clearly, but that doesn't mean
[09:32] that it's not drawn from that.
[09:34] At least the red part isn't drawn from, you know, nautical
[09:38] stuff. You also have to navigate into a port in the dark
[09:42] without sat right without sat nav, right?
[09:45] So they clearly must have had some, the only system
[09:49] that they could have had was lighting.
[09:51] Right.
[09:52] So I mean, I'd be surprised if, you know, the Athenians
[09:55] and Greeks and all those dudes didn't have some sort
[09:59] of lighting system to lead people home.
[10:02] Yeah.
[10:04] And, and also even in airplanes now.
[10:09] So airplanes do use red and white.
[10:16] Red over white all right, white over red, you're dead.
[10:19] So when you're coming in for a landing, there's landing
[10:23] lights that you align for your, for your glide path.
[10:28] And when those are aligned correctly, like I said, red
[10:31] over white is the way that you want it.
[10:35] So clearly aviation has used the same red, but has gone
[10:41] away from the green.
[10:43] Which is interesting.
[10:44] Yeah.
[10:45] But I think that that buttresses the idea that the red
[10:47] came first and the green just kind of grew out.
[10:49] Yes.
[10:49] Yes.
[10:50] And the green is just the contrasting color.
[10:52] Yeah, and I think that what we've kind of decided red
[10:55] is blood, red is danger, red is hot coals.
[10:58] And yeah, it's like, you know, it's the color that
[11:01] you can make, right?
[11:03] Like orange, like I agree, like fire tends to be orange,
[11:07] but red, if you can make any color that you want, is
[11:10] a better color, brighter.
[11:12] Yeah, right.
[11:15] Okay, so I'm gonna say nautical red is ancient and
[11:18] stoplights such as they are were and signs for that
[11:23] matter are created in the US sometime after Henry Ford.
[11:27] Oh, hey, look at this.
[11:28] The first thing that I found the origin of the green,
[11:30] yellow and red color scheme for traffic lights.
[11:33] Nice.
[11:37] While some of the specifics have been lost to history,
[11:39] it is known that this color scheme derives from a
[11:41] system used by the railroad industry since the 1830s.
[11:44] We forgot about the damn railroad.
[11:46] We did.
[11:46] They're useful.
[11:47] Idiots.
[11:49] This is why we need Jason and Joey on the show right here.
[11:53] Of course, it's the railroads.
[11:55] They chose red as the color for stop.
[11:57] It is thought because red is for centuries been used
[11:59] to indicate danger.
[12:01] Okay.
[12:02] For the other colors, they chose white as the color
[12:04] for go green is the color for caution.
[12:06] The choice of a white light for go turned out to
[12:09] cause a lot of problems.
[12:12] Okay, I can see that.
[12:14] In an incident in 1914, a red lens fell out of
[12:17] its holder leaving the white light behind it exposed.
[12:21] Yeah.
[12:22] It's ended with a train running a stop signal and
[12:24] crashing into another train.
[12:25] Thus the world decided to change it.
[12:27] So the green meant go.
[12:29] Yep.
[12:33] In the late 1920s, several automatic signals were
[12:36] invested and invented.
[12:37] So we were pretty close on when we got automatic signaling.
[12:42] I see in this thing about the guy who tried to
[12:46] stop a train with his red shirt.
[12:49] That seems anecdotal.
[12:54] Also red is the easiest color to see by the human eye.
[12:58] Right.
[12:58] That's helpful.
[13:02] I do know a fun fact and I wish I knew which direction
[13:06] was I guess I do.
[13:07] I think it's red is on the left.
[13:11] If it's a sideways stoplight.
[13:15] Yellow in the middle and green on the right.
[13:18] But it always has to be the same for colorblind people.
[13:23] They can't just like switch it the other way.
[13:25] Right.
[13:27] So semaphore.
[13:31] You know that flag thing they do on ships?
[13:34] Comes from the ancient Greek word sema meaning sign
[13:37] of fours meaning bearer or bearing.
[13:38] So essentially semaphore translates to sign bearer.
[13:40] That's interesting.
[13:41] So maybe they were using flags back then.
[13:45] Okay, railroad semaphore.
[13:48] So I guess okay, so they're using this as so semaphore.
[13:52] It's not only the flag thing, but it's also the light system.
[13:55] So the row the railroad semaphore system was originally patented
[13:59] by Joseph James Stevens in the 1840s.
[14:03] And in the US and some other countries modern traffic signals
[14:07] are either 8 or 12 inches in diameter.
[14:09] It must be visible in every kind of weather and lighting condition.
[14:12] Yeah, it's important.
[14:13] I do like the idea that you know, we were we were going
[14:16] with lights and I was worried about filaments over, you know,
[14:20] oil lamps.
[14:21] But yeah, why not just have flags?
[14:24] Do whatever you want, right?
[14:25] Yeah, I mean nighttime is the problem, right?
[14:30] Okay, so I guess that's true on to Googleable.
[14:35] We'll do a little bit more research.
[14:37] See if we can find you a more complete answer and we'll
[14:40] link in and show notes if we can if not then just know red
[14:45] means stop and drive safely.
[14:46] Yeah, if you've got a if you got an answer there, go ahead
[14:49] and hit us up on the well, you know how to contact us or
[14:54] Harper does at least.
[14:55] Yeah, you can you can contact us at under beatables on
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[15:03] under beatables.com.
[15:05] And if you like the show, please do review us wherever
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[15:16] And singing us out this week in true Pacer's form.
[15:19] For a once and always coach Bobby Sook Leonard now in
[15:22] the Hall of Fame.
[15:25] Turn out the lights the parties over.
[15:40] I found this really interesting site.
[15:41] That's giving me the history of stoplights.
[15:44] It's very exciting.
[15:45] I mean it is interesting, right?
[15:47] Yeah, apparently there was a street crossing signals that
[15:51] weren't lit up.
[15:51] They were just signs.
[15:52] They're different colors.
[15:56] That's kind of fun.
[15:58] Yeah.
[16:00] The first automated signs of Chicago in 1910.
[16:06] Oh, wow.
[16:06] They didn't light up.
[16:07] They just were indicators of stop and proceed.
[16:10] Wait, you said they were automated though.
[16:13] Yeah, they weren't lights.
[16:17] They were just they were just little arms.
[16:20] Like they chose on the how were they how were they
[16:23] automated.
[16:24] There's a picture of it and it's like this thing and
[16:26] they've got little arms and like I guess they went up
[16:29] and right.
[16:29] But what's the automation part?
[16:33] Some sort of some form of electricity.
[16:37] I'm concerned that our robot robot overlords have been
[16:39] here a lot longer than I was thinking.
[16:44] I think it works on some form of electricity.
[16:49] Or the wind maybe.
[16:52] You're right.
[16:53] Yes.
[16:55] Whoever gets to go is predicated upon.
[16:57] Downwinds.
[17:00] Downwind goes first.