At least, jaywalkers listened

More than 100 years ago, jaywalking was an epidemic in big cities. So many pedestrians were being killed by new fangled automobiles that Los Angeles seriously considered banning autos from the streets.

A California automobile club was horrified by the prospects of these vehicles being barred. It started to look into ways of stopping the practice of pedestrians walking into the path of on-coming cars.

Nothing seemed to help.

Then, a man who was put in charge of solving the problem came up with a simple solution.

He started a campaign to ridicule the jaywalkers. In fact, this is when the name fo...