Often in life, it’s the little annoyances and inconveniences of life that lead to the creation of grand solutions.
“Why didn’t I think of that?” is a common refrain when problems are resolved.
Charles Adler Jr., a prolific inventor, who enjoyed motoring, did not enjoy wasting valuable time at traffic signals, so he came up with the idea of a traffic-actuated signal.
“I was tired of being stopped by time signals for no reason at all,” Adler told The Evening Sun in a 1977 interview. “I thought it was outrageous that a human being should be subject to a clock.”
Before Adler’s invention was installed at Falls Road, and what was then Belvedere Avenue, today’s Northern Parkway, traffic signals were time operated.
“The whole principle of actuating signals by sound originated with me,” he told the newspaper.
In the 1920s, Falls Road and Belvedere Avenue was still slightly rural and its agrarian overtones were the source of some problems for the new signal.
“After it was installed,” Adler told a reporter, “it blinked like a dime-store Christmas tree until we discovered that cows were activating it every time they mooed.”
What to do?
Another time, a farmer whose vehicle was hornless sat and sat at the unblinking red light.
“He would have been there still had he not bellowed, ‘Change, gol dern ye!’ And it changed immediately,” Adler said.
Today, traffic signals work on principles that Adler established nearly a century ago.
A vehicle rolls up, breaks the beam from a sonic detector overhead, and the signal flashes green, and then reverts to yellow, and finally red.
Perhaps someday a historical marker at Falls Road and Northern Parkway will take note of Adler’s contribution to traffic management.
During his lifetime, Adler acquired more than 60 patents.
He received his first patent in 1914 when he developed and installed an electric brake on his father’s Packard touring car.
Adler later donated many of his patents to the state and federal governments.
The son of a physician, Harry Adler, and Carolyn “Carre” Frank, he was born in 1899 and raised on Madison Avenue in Baltimore, and graduated from the Park School.
He studied for two years at Johns Hopkins University before dropping out and going to work in 1919 as a telegrapher and assistant station agent for the Maryland & Pennsylvania Railroad — known locally as the “Ma & Pa” — in Towson.
The roots for Adler’s traffic signal were born out of an actuated signal he had invented for the railroad which protected the railroad’s numerous grade crossings on its 90-mile route that corkscrewed across Maryland to York, Pennsylvania.
“In absence of railroad traffic the signal showed nothing to the highway but it was showing stop to the railroad,” Adler explained.
“When a train approached, a track circuit actuated the signal because it was fail-safe — and flashed red to the highway,” he said.
Named the Adler Flashing Relay, it was adopted by more than 40 railroads across the country.
Adler, who became a consultant in 1937 to the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad later moved his laboratory to a room in line’s Mount Royal Station. He also remained a consultant to the “Ma & Pa” until 1957.
A man of fecund interests, Adler turned his hand and mind toward the skies in the 1930s when he earned his pilot’s license.
In the early 1940s, he had invented the first in a series of flashing or rotating red lights that were installed on the wings and tails of airplanes. The lights could not be confused with overhead stars or ground lights.
His “‘double-reflector aircraft anti-collision light,” which he came up with in the early 1970s, was installed in two places on the airplane’s tail and emitted flashes of piercing white light that was visible day or night.
He also invented special lenses for the color-blind and a double-filament bulb for warning signals that burned out in sections, allowing replacement of the bulb before it stopped glowing.
Not all of Adler’s inventions panned out or were accepted, one of which was a horn for automobiles, the Space-ometer — an automobile speedometer that displayed the number of car lengths the driver should keep between his car and the car ahead — or the Beaconblub, an application of the aircraft light that would be employed as a daytime running light on cars.
Adler, a devoted railroad fan, lived for years at Sutton Place Apartments where he spread out his empire and carried on his tinkering activities in four apartments that overlooked the mainline tracks of the B & O where he could observe trains before they plunged into the vast train shed that spans the tracks.
The Evening Sun described his rooms as a “branch of the Smithsonian Institution that is crammed with books, bottles, jars, photographs, miniature trains, models of his inventions, testimonies of his inventiveness.”
In his workrooms, he painstakingly created exact scale models of steam engines that eventually became part of the Smithsonian’s permanent collection.
In his busy life, Adler found time to write humor pieces for The New York Times and the Reader’s Digest.
He also collected automobiles including a rare 1955 Lincoln Mark II, a 1972 Corvette and a 1952 MG TD.
His regular routine was to drive the cars twice a week and boasted that he had the “Mark II up to a 100.”
His daughter, the late Amalie Adler Ascher, who was The Sun’s garden columnist for years, told The Evening Sun her father eschewed all physical activity.
“He hated sports,” she said, and “when the urge to exercise came, he would lie down until it passed.”
Adler was a man who was always looking ahead.
As a member of the old Friendship Airport board, in 1964 he advocated for an air-rail station at what is now today’s BWI-Marshall Airport.
His death on Oct. 23, 1980, came only hours before he planned on attending the dedication of Amtrak’s BWI station at its location off Route 170 in Linthicum, which also serves MARC’s Penn Line trains.
Adler, who was 81, was interred in Druid Ridge Cemetery in Pikesville.
