Good morning,
It’s a rainy day for Whitewater again today, with a high of sixty-eight degrees.
It’s wild hair day today, at Lakeview School. There will also be a Middle School Band concert at Whitewater High School tonight at 7 p.m.
Wired recalls that today is a day of frustration for many, a reduction in congestion for others, and profit for municipalities, in a post entitled, “May 13, 1935: Enter the Parking Meter:”
If it weren’t for Pearl Harbor, FDR might have called May 13 a day that will live in infamy. It was 75 years ago that Carl C. Magee of Oklahoma City sought a patent for the world’s first parking meter. Many will come to see the invention as a bane of urban living.
Soon after Magee filed to protect his intellectual property, the world’s first installed parking meters were put into nickel-gulping service right there in Oklahoma City in July 1935. Your five cents (about $.80 in today’s money) got you anywhere from 15 minutes’ to an hour’s worth of parking, depending on location….
Even back in 1935, U.S. cities were having thoroughly modern problems: Workers parked on downtown streets and stayed all day. That left few spaces for shoppers and others who visited the central business district….
Carl Magee’s new parking meter not only solved Oklahoma City’s parking problems, it also got a new revenue stream flowing in to city coffers. Magee mentioned money in the patent application for “meters for measuring the time of occupancy or use of parking or other space, for the use of which it is desirous an incidental charge be made upon a time basis.”
U.S. Patent No. 2,118,318 was granted for the device May 24, 1938. The idea spread to other cities around the country and the world. Magee managed to make money manufacturing meters and selling them to many municipalities, starting at $23 a pop ($365 in current cash).
