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The claim, as it circulates: a web aggregator's traffic-light page states that "Lester Wire was born on September 17th 1885 in Walkerton Indiana" and credits him, on that nativity, with the invention of the traffic light — a claim that would make Walkerton the birthplace of the man who gave the world the signal. Tested whole, it fails on every element it asserts. The man: Lester Farnsworth Wire was born 3 September 1887 — not 17 September 1885 — in Salt Lake City, Utah, where the Utah Department of Transportation's own history and the Salt Lake City cemetery record place his birth, his life, and his grave; no record reached places him in Indiana at any date. The invention: Wire, a Salt Lake City police officer, built an early electric traffic signal in 1912 at Main Street and 200 South in Salt Lake City — and never patented it; the first United States traffic-signal patent is U.S. 1,251,666, issued 1 January 1918 to J. B. Hoge of Cleveland, and Garrett Morgan's signal patent (U.S. 1,475,024, 1923) belongs to Cleveland likewise. Neither patentee, and not Wire, has any Walkerton tie in any record reached.
The part that stands is Utah's: an officer named Lester Wire did build one of the first electric traffic signals, in 1912, in the city where he was born and is buried. The Walkerton element stands nowhere — it is an aggregator's error, of the same class as the generated "facts" pages that make this town the hometown of an astronaut and the childhood home of a war correspondent it never held, and it is printed here as a failure with its settler named so it stops traveling: the Utah DOT biography and the patent record, both read for this article, close the claim. Walkerton's inventor record is smaller than the internet's version of it, and it is the real one — three men and a company, in the article above.
Sources: Utah Department of Transportation, history of Lester Wire and the 1912 signal (read November 2026); Salt Lake City cemetery and biographical record (Wire, b. 3 September 1887, Salt Lake City); U.S. Patents 1,251,666 (Hoge, 1918) and 1,475,024 (Morgan, 1923); aggregator claim as published at magnifymind.com, "Who Invented The Traffic Light?" (read November 2026).