Next week school starts back up in my hometown, which means a lot of kids waiting every morning for the school bus.
In most places in this country, standard school buses are bright yellow, and have been pretty much since we had standard school buses.
In early America, not every kid went to school; in a lot of cases, kids simply couldn’t get to schools.
Sometimes they were too far away, or there was no safe or efficient way to get there, or kids had to work on the family farm for part or all of the year.
In the second half of the 1800s, states started to pass compulsory education laws, and they set up consolidated schools to replace the one-room schoolhouses that communities had.
These schools used a bunch of different ways to get their students to class.
They included school wagons, which were exactly what they sound like: wagons that ran to and from school.
Imagine how many kids showed up in the morning feeling woozy because of those bumpy rides!
Around the turn of the century, there were “school cars,” which looked a lot like extra long Model Ts.
But in other places, people just used regular cars, or trucks, or standard buses.
And some approaches worked better than others.
That bugged a professor at Columbia University, Frank Cyr.
He figured making buses uniform would boost safety for kids, and make buses cheaper for districts, since the manufacturers could just produce and sell the same bus for everyone.
Cyr called a nationwide school bus standards convention, which came up with 44 standards about the dimensions of the bus, its doors, its seats, its aisles and its color.
There had been a push to make school buses red and blue, for patriotism, but Cyr felt the color should be bright, so buses were more visible and therefore safer.
He hung paint samples on the wall for conference members; they chose a shade of yellow that best made the black lettering on the sides stand out.
That color is now known as National School Bus Glossy Yellow, and like many of those standards from the 1939 conference, it’s still used across the country today.
Though if you were really up for it, I bet you could find a spot or two where you could still get a ride to school on a horse-drawn wagon.
Starting today in the community of Tilburg, in the Netherlands, it’s the Redhead Days Festival.
Organizers call it the “oldest, largest and most spectacular redhead festival in the world,” with thousands of gingers representing 80 countries.
And some of the diehard participants spend the whole time camping together.
Why Are School Buses Yellow? (HowStuffWorks)
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