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Button Copy
Button copy is a type of physical design for road signs in the United States. Round plastic retroreflective buttons made of transparent plastic are placed in rows following the contours of sign legend elements, usually painted white, such as letters, numbers, arrows, and borders. In daylight, the buttons visually blend with the white sign legend elements and so are minimally conspicuous. At night, light from each approaching vehicle's headlamps strikes the retroreflective buttons and is reflected back towards the eyes of the vehicle's driver. Thus the sign is made sufficiently conspicuous and legible for adequately fast and accurate recognition and interpretation by drivers. Button copy is now rarely manufactured. It has been supplanted by a newer technology: retroreflective sheeting made by various manufacturers in numerous colors and grades. As state departments of transportation increasingly stopped specifying button copy signs in favor of signs made with sheeting, it became un ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Road Sign
Traffic signs or road signs are signs erected at the side of or above roads to give instructions or provide information to road users. The earliest signs were simple wooden or stone milestones. Later, signs with directional arms were introduced, for example the fingerposts in the United Kingdom and their wooden counterparts in Saxony. With traffic volumes increasing since the 1930s, many countries have adopted pictorial signs or otherwise simplified and standardized their signs to overcome language barriers, and enhance traffic safety. Such pictorial signs use symbols (often silhouettes) in place of words and are usually based on international protocols. Such signs were first developed in Europe, and have been adopted by most countries to varying degrees. International conventions Various international conventions have helped to achieve a degree of uniformity in Traffic Signing in various countries. Categories Traffic signs can be grouped into several types. For example, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territories, nine Minor Outlying Islands, and 326 Indian reservations. The United States is also in free association with three Pacific Island sovereign states: the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau. It is the world's third-largest country by both land and total area. It shares land borders with Canada to its north and with Mexico to its south and has maritime borders with the Bahamas, Cuba, Russia, and other nations. With a population of over 333 million, it is the most populous country in the Americas and the third most populous in the world. The national capital of the United States is Washington, D.C. and its most populous city and principal financial center is New York City. Paleo-Americ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Retroreflectors
A retroreflector (sometimes called a retroflector or cataphote) is a device or surface that reflection (physics), reflects radiation (usually light) back to its source with minimum scattering. This works at a wide range of angle of incidence (optics), angle of incidence, unlike a planar mirror, which does this only if the mirror is exactly perpendicular to the wave front, having a zero angle of incidence. Being directed, the retroflector's reflection is brighter than that of a diffuse reflector. Corner reflectors and Cat's eye (road), cat's eye reflectors are the most used kinds. Types There are several ways to obtain retroreflection: Corner reflector A set of three mutually perpendicular reflective surfaces, placed to form the internal corner of a cube, work as a retroreflector. The three corresponding normal vectors of the corner's sides form a basis in which to represent the direction of an arbitrary incoming ray, . When the ray reflects from the first side, say x, the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Headlamp
A headlamp is a lamp attached to the front of a vehicle to illuminate the road ahead. Headlamps are also often called headlights, but in the most precise usage, ''headlamp'' is the term for the device itself and ''headlight'' is the term for the beam of light produced and distributed by the device. Headlamp performance has steadily improved throughout the automobile age, spurred by the great disparity between daytime and nighttime traffic fatalities: the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration states that nearly half of all traffic-related fatalities occur in the dark, despite only 25% of traffic travelling during darkness. Other vehicles, such as trains and aircraft, are required to have headlamps. Bicycle headlamps are often used on bicycles, and are required in some jurisdictions. They can be powered by a battery or a small generator like a bottle or hub dynamo. History of automotive headlamps Origins The first horseless carriages used carriage lamps ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Retroreflective Sheeting
Retroreflective sheeting is flexible retroreflective material primarily used to increase the nighttime conspicuity of traffic signs, high-visibility clothing, and other items so they are safely and effectively visible in the light of an approaching driver's headlamps. They are also used as a material to increase the scanning range of barcodes in factory settings. The sheeting consists of retroreflective glass beads, microprisms, or encapsulated lenses sealed onto a fabric or plastic substrate. Many different colors and degrees of reflection intensity are provided by numerous manufacturers for various applications. As with any retroreflector, sheeting glows brightly when there is a small angle between the observer's eye and the light source directed toward the sheeting, but appears nonreflective when viewed from other directions. Applications Retroreflective sheeting is widely used in a variety of applications today, after early widespread use on road signs in the 1960s. High ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
