History
On June 7, 1906, The New York Times reported on an early implementation of what might be considered speed bumps in the U.S. town of Chatham, New Jersey, which planned to raise its crosswalks five inches above the road level: "This scheme of stopping automobile speeding has been discussed by different municipalities, but Chatham is the first place to put it in practice". The average automobile's top speed at the time was around 30 mph.
Arthur Holly Compton was a physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1927 for his discoveries contradicting the then-common belief in the electromagnetic theory. He is commonly known for his work in the Compton Effect with X-ray theories. He invented the speed bump in 1953. Compton began designs on the speed bump after noticing the speed at which motorists passed Brookings Hall at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where he was a chancellor.
According to a publication by the Institute of Transportation Engineers, the first speed bump in Europe was built in 1970 in the city of Delft in the Netherlands.
Read more about this topic: Speed Bump
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“We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.”
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