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Traffic police officer William Potts from Detroit (USA). Green and red lanterns had been organizing the flow of carriages in England since 1868. But it was in 1917 that Potts invented an automatic device using red, yellow and green lights. According to researcher Michel Pastoureau, the relationship between the three colors is an old social code, used since the appreciation of the chromatic spectrum, created by Newton in the 17th century. pre-car codes”, says Pastoureau in the book Dicionário das Cores do Nosso Tempo. Thus, red, which since the Middle Ages has been the color of interdiction, would make green (its complement in the spectrum) the symbol of permission. Yellow, located at the midpoint between the two other colors, would then serve as the transition.
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