Insert Nickel: The first parking meters
On May 13, 1935 — 90 years ago today — lawyer and newspaper publisher Carl Magee of Oklahoma City applied for a patent of an improved version of something he had conceived and invented three years previously: A coin-operated parking meter.
Birth of The Parking Meter
Automobiles were becoming more popular in the 1930s. They were much more convenient to use than horse-drawn carts.
But in urban settings — including Oklahoma City — the increase in automobile traffic created a whole new problem: Employees of downtown shops and offices were driving in and taking up all the streetside parking spaces.
Paying customers would then come along later and not find spaces near their shopping or business destinations. They began to gravitate to establishments away from downtown — suburban shopping centers, for example.
The Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce needed a solution. One member of the Chamber’s traffic committee was Carl Magee, who had moved to the city in 1927 after a decade of founding and running what would become the Albuquerque Tribune newspaper in New Mexico.
Before his work on the parking meter, Carl Magee had founded a newspaper in Albuquerque, N.M., and had played a large role in covering wrongdoing in the Warren G. Harding administration that became known as the Teapot Dome Scandal. Photo Source: Oklahoma Historical Society
Magee’s brainstorm: Charge people to park. He imagined a coin-operated timer in which people — employees or customers — could pay for a fixed time to park. Not only would that bring in extra money for the city’s parking efforts, it might also free up parking spots earlier. If people refused to pay, they’d be fined. That, too, would bring in money to city coffers. Magee patented his idea in 1932.
Magee then kicked off a design contest for the University of Oklahoma’s engineering department to design a device that would operate in all kinds of weather and would also be vandalism-proof.
None of the student-submitted designs met Magee’s needs, so he hired a couple of the school’s engineering professors and built what they called the Black Maria, at left.
Now that they had a working design, they needed a manufacturer. Magee hired the MacNick Company of Tulsa — which specialized in making timing devices to explode nitroglycerin to increase the flow of oil in oil wells — to build the meters.
On May 13, 1935, Magee applied for a patent for an improved version of his parking meter. That patent would be granted on May 24, 1938.
Magee’s meters charged drivers five cents to park for one hour. Parking spots opened so frequently in Oklahoma City that merchants began to clamor for meters on their streets as well. Photo Source: The Oklahoman
The Idea of Charging For Parking Spreads
On July 16, 1935, Oklahoma City had 150 of Magee’s meters installed along 14 blocks of downtown Oklahoma City. Some residents were greatly offended. Some drivers felt it was the equivalent of placing another tax on their automobile. Others filed lawsuits.
A month later, the Rev. C.H. North of Oklahoma City became the first person to receive a parking ticket. He argued in court that he had stopped for only a minute to run into a store to get change for the meter. The judge dismissed his case.
But downtown merchants were delighted with the new meters. Downtown employees found new places to park, freeing up spots for customers.
By the early 1940s, there were more than 140,000 parking meters installed across the U.S. Many of those were made by Magee’s Dual Park-O-Meter company and sold to cities for $25 per meter.
Oddly enough, parking meters weren’t introduced in New York City until 1951.
A city worker in Seattle empties a parking meter by using a key to open a side panel. Coins would then fall into a funnel and then slide into a collection box. Photo Source: Seattle Municipal Archives