The age-old pursuit of high school kids and university students is to collect road signs. Late at night, when no-one is there to witness the offense, they yank the board off its post and take it home, to store on their bedroom wall as a trophy. Every municipality has encountered this problem, and it persists through generation after generation. One day those boards may end up as old metal signs for sale.
Needless to say, road signs are very important. They regulate and direct traffic simply by being there, making them a relatively cheap method of performing that function. A traffic officer would need to be paid a salary and electric lights use power on a constant basis, but a sign, once installed, costs nothing to maintain (unless it is sprayed with gunfire, as sometimes happens on the outskirts of towns).
It is likely that the first road markers were large rocks or heaps of rocks. People have traditionally used landmarks to navigate and using large stones or piles of stones for this purpose was an obvious choice. In time, people began to mark the stones with significant numbers or names, such as how far it was to the next town. The ancient Romans indicated the distance to Rome on stone pillars at the roadside.
The introduction of the automobile at the turn of the twentieth century gave new impetus to the desire for a comprehensive system of road symbols. The earliest attempt was the one made by the Italian Touring Club, a group of automobile drivers who put together a system of symbols. Since then, there have been other attempts in different parts of the world, as well as cooperative agreements.
Uniformity is a long-held ideal of road symbol designers. But it is difficult to keep the symbols the same from country to country, due to national preferences and idiosyncrasies. The UK was at one time the only country to maintain signage in miles and not kilometers. The USA, on the other hand, developed their own system of symbols in 1960, which was copied by some other countries, but then began to make use of the symbols from other countries as well.
The challenge in designing road symbols is that they have to be universally intelligible. In other words, they need to be understood by a vast variety of people, many of whom have limited literacy or who do not even speak the native language(s) of the country in which the symbols are to be used. Shapes and colors therefore become very important in trying to attain universal legibility.
At the same time, people do not have very long to read and assess road signs, since they are traveling at relatively high speeds when they read them. The signs need to be quickly comprehensible too. This makes the use of color extremely important, as well as large, bold text and numbers.
Starting with stone in ancient times, road signs are currently manufactured out of metal, such as aluminum, and coated in reflective plastic to show up at night. They are therefore not worth much in terms of their scrap value. The attraction in old metal signs for sale lies more in their sentimental or historical value, whether used as part of an interior decorating theme or simply on your bedroom wall at home.
Needless to say, road signs are very important. They regulate and direct traffic simply by being there, making them a relatively cheap method of performing that function. A traffic officer would need to be paid a salary and electric lights use power on a constant basis, but a sign, once installed, costs nothing to maintain (unless it is sprayed with gunfire, as sometimes happens on the outskirts of towns).
It is likely that the first road markers were large rocks or heaps of rocks. People have traditionally used landmarks to navigate and using large stones or piles of stones for this purpose was an obvious choice. In time, people began to mark the stones with significant numbers or names, such as how far it was to the next town. The ancient Romans indicated the distance to Rome on stone pillars at the roadside.
The introduction of the automobile at the turn of the twentieth century gave new impetus to the desire for a comprehensive system of road symbols. The earliest attempt was the one made by the Italian Touring Club, a group of automobile drivers who put together a system of symbols. Since then, there have been other attempts in different parts of the world, as well as cooperative agreements.
Uniformity is a long-held ideal of road symbol designers. But it is difficult to keep the symbols the same from country to country, due to national preferences and idiosyncrasies. The UK was at one time the only country to maintain signage in miles and not kilometers. The USA, on the other hand, developed their own system of symbols in 1960, which was copied by some other countries, but then began to make use of the symbols from other countries as well.
The challenge in designing road symbols is that they have to be universally intelligible. In other words, they need to be understood by a vast variety of people, many of whom have limited literacy or who do not even speak the native language(s) of the country in which the symbols are to be used. Shapes and colors therefore become very important in trying to attain universal legibility.
At the same time, people do not have very long to read and assess road signs, since they are traveling at relatively high speeds when they read them. The signs need to be quickly comprehensible too. This makes the use of color extremely important, as well as large, bold text and numbers.
Starting with stone in ancient times, road signs are currently manufactured out of metal, such as aluminum, and coated in reflective plastic to show up at night. They are therefore not worth much in terms of their scrap value. The attraction in old metal signs for sale lies more in their sentimental or historical value, whether used as part of an interior decorating theme or simply on your bedroom wall at home.
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