L’Speed Cameras, at least as a concept, it is almost as old as the automobile. Among the first to imagine, with a good approximation, a system capable of detecting the speed of vehicles in traffic, was the American science fiction writer John Jacob Astor, who lost his life in the sinking of the Titanic. “[…] The policemen on duty also have Kodak cameras mounted on tripods that show the position of any carriage at half and quarter second intervals, with which it is easy to determine the exact speed …“, He wrote in 1894, when the automobile adventure was beginning to take its first steps.
Germany was a pioneer nation in the installation of these systems. And the mobile speed detector is certainly not a gimmick that you see every day first used by the traffic police in February 1959 on a stretch of road near Düsseldorf. It is an invention that represented a turning point for world mobility, especially if you think that before VRG 2 traffic radar unit (this is the name of the first velocimeter in the world patented by Telefunken in 1957) it had never been possible to accurately measure the speed of vehicles on the road.
The technological evolution of speed cameras, more and more precise, more and more infallible, has gone hand in hand with that of cars, on which from generation to generation engineers and designers have introduced devices capable of making speed control easier. Mercedes was among the pioneers in the matterusing its first cruise control yet in 1975 on the saloons of the S-Class and on the SLC sports cars of the C 107 series. later a limiter function would be added, which allowed the driver to set a maximum speed beyond which, when the command was activated, it was impossible to go. Today it is normal, at the time it was almost science fiction.
(In the cover image, a 1975 Mercedes-Benz 450 SEL)
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