A few days ago I was driving north on North Davis Street in Pea Ridge, approaching the intersection with East Pickens (Ark. Hwy. 72 east). A car was coming from the west in old downtown, passing Webb’s Feed and Seed. I assumed that it would be going on east out of town. But suddenly it started turning right onto North Davis Street beside me, and then, its right signal light began flashing. I had some critical thoughts right then, thinking, “Why turn on your signal flashers at all if you are going to wait until you are already turning?” It sure doesn’t help your fellow motorists know your intentions. Signal lights are supposed to courteously inform and warn the other drivers around you, but the message never happens if a driver waits until the last second to turn on the blinkers.
Then I began thinkingthat this is an example of wonderful new technologies becoming no-gainers if the new capabilities are thoughtlessly used.
Many of us who are 60 or 70 years old can easily remember when cars and trucks had no signal lights at all. Signal lights, as I recall them, began to be available as add-on options in the 1940s. You could buy a kit from the car parts store or from Western Auto or Oklahoma Tire and Supply, and install signal lights on your vehicle yourself. For pickups and trucks, often the lights on the front were round lights about 4 inches in diameter, mounted on a little pedestal atop each front fender. On cars, the frontlights might be fastened to the grill by an improvised bracket or fixed above the front bumper.
Likewise, the flashing lights for the back would be fastened to the vehicle with some kind of self-invented bracket. The operating unit inside fastened to the steering column with a strap clamp. One had to run new wires to a hot wire from the battery, and then run wires to each light on the corners of the vehicle. It wasn’t greatly complicated, but it took some time to install, and you had to know something about electrical circuits and wiring. Some of the nicer units had a little rubber wheel which rolled on the underside of the steering wheel when the flashers were turned on.
The little wheel turned off the flasher as your steering wheel turned back the other way coming out of a turn. In the early ’50s,signal lights were still optional equipment, like radios, clocks, wheel covers, automatic transmissions, floor mats and white-wall tires. If I recall rightly, by about 1953 signal lights had become standard equipment.
When I was taking the tests for a drivers license, we learned to do hand signals for turning. The hand signals required that the driver open the window, extend the left arm, and use it to signal the other drivers of your intentions.
For a left turn, you put your arm straight out, pointing left. For a right turn you bent your elbow, pointing your forearm upward. You signaled a stop by holding your arm downward in a 45 degree angle. Some drivers just dangled the arm down beside the driver’s side door. That was how to do it, back before we had brake lights, signal lights and other such niceties.
Have you ever noticed how many switches and controls are on the turn signal lever on vehicles these days? Moving the lever up or down turns on a left or right turn signal.
Rotating the handle controls your windshield wipers. Pushing in on the end of the handle turns on your windshield washer and wipers. Pulling the handle toward you toggles the headlights between high and low beam. I think the engineers are just trying to see how many things they can put on one little lever.
Remember when the dimmer switch for your headlights was in the floorboard? I liked it that way.
It was less distracting than using your hand to dim the lights. I acknowledge, though, that sometimes your foot missed the button and you were kicking around the floorboard, trying to dim the lights.
It is funny to me howsome gadgets catch on in cars, but others don’t. In 1956, some of the Oldsmobile 98s came out with a light-sensitive control to automatically dim the lights if you were meeting another car with headlights on. The gadget was available on some models of Chevrolets, but I think it never caught on. Who would have predicted that we would be carrying little key-mounted radios to lock or unlock our car doors?
Or that we would have motorized window lifts? Or heated seats? Or little TVs to see behind us? Or an electronic backseat driver to tell us where to go?
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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history.
He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Community, Pages 5 on 10/18/2011