Today Is...First Traffic Lights Installed

When someone stuck up some red and green lamps today outside the Palace of Westminster in 1868, they invented the very first traffic lights and the red/amber/green are used almost everywhere around the world thanks to the 1968 Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals Chapter III which set the rules for stopping traffic at junctions and giving men (it's always men) time to sit and pick their nose.
What nobody told me about traffic lights was how they actually worked, i just assumed they spent the same amount of time on each colour until one day, after sitting at a red light for an eternity, someone knocked on my window and asked me politely to move forward onto the detector to trigger the light.
It was only when i told other people and they said yep, that's how they work i thought why did nobody tell me, i'm been sitting at red lights for years like some sort of moron thinking the traffic controllers had a grudge against me.
Turns out the thing is called an inductive loop detector and they are rectangles of wires just before the stop line and when your car stops on them, it breaks the circuit and the lights know that a car is waiting to be shown green.
Obviously if you don't position the car in the right place the light thinks nobody is there and keeps it on red longer which makes sense because no point in stopping one lot of traffic is there is nobody waiting to go the other way but bicycles and motorbikes being smaller and less heavy, sometimes have problems triggering the detector but they are advised to  position both bike wheels directly over either the right or left side of the loop.
Makes sense once somebody bothers to tell you.