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A while ago I was driving on US 32 through a very dark and rainy Adams County. If it wasn't for the lane markings, I am not sure I could have found the road. It was not that different than a drive that a man named John Edward White Sr. took on Ohio 60 past McConnelsville in 1956. The difference between the two drives? White's drive on a foggy morning sparked an idea that has made billions of drives safer for millions of Americans for nearly 70 years. White was an employee of the Ohio Department of Transportation. On that morning in McConnelsville he was just a dad trying to get his family safely to Detroit. The fog was so thick he had to stick his head out the window to see.
When he got back to work, he had an idea. Why not paint a white line down the edge of the highway? The line he knew would reflect light in bad weather and let drivers know where the right edge of the highway was. He ran the idea past his boss and then grabbed a portable paint-spraying machine normally used to paint things like crosswalks and then headed out to Ohio 550 west of Marietta. The road connects Marietta to Barlow and Bartlett while going around some of Washington County's most hilly terrain.
On Oct. 1, 1956, White and fellow employee James Science used the machine to paint the first fog line on the right side of a sharp curve. The small test was a success. That winter White worked on scaling the idea so more ground could be covered. He took an old car and removed the body. On the chassis he built a machine that would automatically spray the line on the highway. The old car, and its make-shift paint machine was attached to the front end of the truck that painted the line down the middle of the road. The solid fog line would be painted at the same time the dotted centerline was put down.
During the 1957 painting season the line started appearing on roads all over Ohio. Other states soon began to copy Ohio. In 1961, just five years after White stuck his head out the window to get through McConnelsville, the recommendation was made nationwide when it was included in the manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices produced by the American Association of Highway Officials. The "edge line" as it was officially called, was made part of the standard template used to design roads. It can still be found in the guide -- on page 562 of the MUTCD 11th Edition, Section 3b.09, the guide spends nearly a page outlining the proper application of the line. In Connecticut, a different road worker had come up with the idea independent of the Ohio efforts. The idea by John Dorr was soon copied by neighboring states.
Today, the line can be found on most major roads outside of cities. The nation has 160,000 miles of major highways. The marking does not always appear on roads with limited markings such as county and township roads. All told, the country has more than 4 million miles of road. Many other nations also include the line down the side of their highways as well. With 40 million miles of roads worldwide, the line has impacted millions of drivers by keeping them on the road during wet and foggy trips.
All of them have Edward White and others to thank. His drive to McConnelsville in 1956 made driving safer for all of us, including me on a dark and wet night in Adams County.
Art Smith is online manager of The Times, he can be reached at asmith@mariettatimes.com