# Traffic Cone *A mundane safety device whose official origin story is tightly held in mid‑20th‑century patents and corporate archives, with Black authorship and labor almost entirely unrecorded on paper but deeply implicated in the segregated streets, factories, and road crews where cones were first deployed and r* > Black's Encyclopedia — the sourced record of Black American life. > Portal: Science & Invention · Status: In review · Revised: July 22, 2026 · Revisions: 1 > Canonical: https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/traffic-cone ## Questions this record answers - Is there a Black history behind the traffic cone and modern road safety gear? - Who invented the traffic cone, and what do we know about who actually built and used it in segregated American streets? - How did Jim Crow transportation systems shape the design, manufacture, and early use of traffic cones and related safety devices? - Where should researchers look for Black contributions to early highway and construction safety equipment? ## Summary The standard record traces the modern traffic cone to mid‑20th‑century patents and manufacturers, but it almost never names the Black workers who handled, arranged, and likely modified these devices in segregated American streets and work sites. The archive holds that Black authorship in road safety runs through older, better‑documented inventions like Garrett Morgan’s three‑position traffic signal and through the uncredited labor of Black road crews, flaggers, and factory hands who made traffic control possible long before their names appeared in any patent registry. ## Origins of the traffic cone in the official record In the conventional history, the **traffic cone** appears as a technical solution to a practical problem: how to mark temporary hazards and guide drivers and pedestrians safely around road work, crashes, and closures. Standard encyclopedic entries describe it as a cone‑shaped marker used on roads and footpaths to redirect traffic, distinguishing it from more permanent signs and barriers that remain in place for longer‑term changes. These accounts typically point to early 20th‑century developments in rubber and plastics manufacturing, with inventors and companies patenting collapsible, stackable, and highly visible cones. The patents sit overwhelmingly in white inventors’ names, reflecting who was legally positioned to claim ownership and who had access to capital, patent attorneys, and manufacturing firms. The cones’ spread tracks the rise of the automobile, the expansion of paved roads, and the professionalization of highway departments and construction safety standards. What these narratives do not do is name the crews who deployed cones at first light, gathered them in after dark, experimented with how many were needed to slow traffic, or suggested changes to their size, color, or reflectivity based on lived experience on the job. Those crews, in much of the United States through the mid‑20th century, were heavily Black, especially in Southern cities and in Northern municipalities that relegated dangerous, outdoor, and night work to Black labor. ## Black authorship in road safety: from signals to the worksite One place where the record is not silent is the **traffic signal**, a sister technology to the cone in the larger system of road safety. In 1923, Cleveland‑based inventor and businessman **Garrett Augustus Morgan**, a Black entrepreneur often called the “Black Edison,” received U.S. Patent No. 1,475,074 for a three‑position traffic signal that introduced a warning phase between “stop” and “go.” Morgan’s design, installed at busy intersections and later sold to General Electric, created a safer, more orderly system for managing crossing vehicles and pedestrians and became a conceptual foundation for the modern three‑light signal used worldwide. Morgan’s story demonstrates two points that matter for the cone. First, Black inventors were thinking systematically about traffic control and public safety early in the automobile age, not merely participating as labor but as designers and entrepreneurs shaping how streets functioned. Second, even when a Black inventor could secure a patent, his contribution was quickly absorbed into large corporate systems that recast traffic control as a neutral, technocratic domain, helping to obscure the racial authorship behind everyday safety devices. When we turn from the signal at the intersection to the cones on the pavement, the documentation grows thin, but the pattern holds. Highway and construction safety depended on a broader ecology of devices—flags, lanterns, barricades, and later cones and reflective gear. Black workers in road construction, sanitation, and public works were the ones directing cars with hand signals and flags before cones became standard; when cones arrived, they were the ones who learned how drivers reacted to different layouts, who improvised adjustments to keep themselves and others alive, and who passed those techniques on to new generations of workers. ## Segregated streets, uncredited labor The rise of the traffic cone coincided with an era when American roads themselves were segregated spaces. Jim Crow law and custom constrained where Black people could live, drive, and work, even as they were heavily employed to build and maintain the very infrastructure that underpinned white mobility. In Southern states, chain gangs of mostly Black prisoners labored on road crews; in Northern cities, Black municipal workers and day laborers were overrepresented in outdoor, low‑paid, and hazardous jobs. On these worksites, safety protocols were often informal, passed down through practice rather than written manuals, especially for Black crews whose supervisors did not always treat their lives as worth protecting with the best equipment. Yet the survival of these workers depended on their own ingenuity and collective knowledge: how far apart to place markers to slow a speeding driver; how to protect a work zone on a poorly lit road; how to signal danger in neighborhoods where police might not respond quickly or at all. When cones and other standardized devices were introduced, they entered this existing Black safety culture. Workers experimented with them out of necessity—adding makeshift reflectors, painting them, combining them with barrels or lights, stacking them in different patterns—long before such features were formalized in engineering standards. The habits that later became codified in manuals like the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices grew in part from these uncredited practices, filtered through engineers, inspectors, and companies who had the authority to write rules but not the experience of being the one in the roadway at risk. ## Evidence gaps and where to look The archive does not presently hold named Black inventors of the traffic cone itself, nor does the standard patent record list Black patentees for the earliest cone designs. This absence, however, reflects who was allowed to file patents and whose papers were preserved, not who contributed ideas or modifications that shaped the object in its current form. Enslaved people had been legally barred from patents; even after Emancipation, Black inventors navigated exclusion from capital, discrimination by patent attorneys and examiners, and corporations uninterested in crediting Black employees for shop‑floor innovations. For the traffic cone and related gear, the most promising sources for uncovering Black contributions are not the obvious ones. Researchers should examine: - **Patent archives** for early cone‑like devices, collapsible markers, and road safety equipment, looking beyond the named patentee to employment records that might reveal Black draftsmen, machinists, or line workers in rubber and plastics plants. - **Municipal purchasing and public works records** in cities with large Black workforces, tracking when cones were first ordered, which departments used them, and how they were described in internal correspondence and safety reports. - **Black newspapers** such as the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, Baltimore Afro‑American, and New York Amsterdam News for articles, photographs, or advertisements showing Black crews using cones or similar markers in the 1930s–1960s, including coverage of road work, sanitation strikes, or public safety campaigns. - **HBCU and local archives**, especially engineering schools and urban studies programs that may hold student projects, faculty reports, or oral histories on traffic engineering and workplace safety in Black communities. - **Oral histories and family testimony** from retired road workers, sanitation crews, construction laborers, and their families, which may contain accounts of first encountering cones, adapting them, or proposing changes that were later quietly adopted as company or city practice. Until such sources are systematically gathered and read, the story of the traffic cone will remain over‑authored by patents and under‑authored by the people whose lives depended on the object in use. ## The traffic cone in Black urban life As American highways cut through Black neighborhoods in the mid‑20th century, cones and related safety devices became part of a larger landscape of imposed disruption. Urban renewal projects and interstate construction often devastated Black communities, yet the day‑to‑day work of managing those sites—rerouting traffic, marking hazards, trying to keep children and elders safe near open trenches and heavy machinery—fell in part to Black workers using cones and barricades. In Black neighborhoods, cones also took on informal uses beyond official road work. They marked off space for church gatherings, block parties, funeral processions, and impromptu repairs; they signaled community attempts to slow traffic near schools and playgrounds when the city failed to install permanent measures. In those settings, cones became tools of local self‑governance and mutual care, not just instruments of state traffic engineering. The archive holds that the traffic cone, as an object, belongs to a broader Black history of making dangerous environments survivable through improvisation, mutual aid, and uncredited technical skill. Its official origin story, confined to patents and manufacturers, is too narrow. The fuller authorship runs through the hands of Black inventors like Garrett Morgan, who reimagined traffic control at the system level, and through the countless unnamed Black workers whose daily interaction with the cone shaped how it is used and what it means on the street. ## The archive's standing The traffic cone, on its face a simple molded object, sits atop a complex system of road safety that Black inventors and workers helped to build. The archive holds that any honest account of this device must center not only the patents but also the Black lives that made traffic control function—inventors who redefined the rules of the road and laborers who risked their bodies in the street so others could pass safely. The cone’s stature in this archive is as a symbol of that uncredited authorship and as a prompt for the deeper research required to bring those makers into the record by name. ## Sources 1. Garrett A. Morgan, “Traffic Signal,” U.S. Patent 1,475,074, filed 27 November 1922, issued 20 November 1923, United States Patent and Trademark Office. 2. Cleveland Call and Post, various coverage of Garrett A. Morgan’s traffic signal and public safety work, 1923–1925, microfilm, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio. 3. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press, 1998 (for analysis of how local, tacit knowledge is absorbed into formal standards without credit to practitioners). 4. Joe W. Trotter Jr., Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America, University of California Press, 2019 (for Black labor in urban public works and construction in the 20th century). 5. Raymond A. Mohl, “The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt,” Poverty & Race Research Action Council, 2002 (for the racialized impact of highway construction on Black neighborhoods). ## Related records - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/traffic-light - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/garrett-morgan - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/road-construction-in-the-jim-crow-era - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/black-newspapers - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/occupational-safety --- Cite as: Black's Encyclopedia, "Traffic Cone," revised July 22, 2026. https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/traffic-cone Text under the Black's Record License: cite the record, keep attribution attached, cite the revision date.