This Simple White Line Is America’s Greatest Unsung Innovation

The Wall Street Journal ^ | July 3, 2026 9:00 pm ET | Ben Cohe

[E. Pluribus Unum]

You know about the lightbulb and the iPhone. This is the unknown story of another ingenious creation that changed a nation.

Over the past 250 years, America has produced the world’s most valuable inventions. 

The lightbulb. The internet. The telephone and the iPhone. Since the founding of the United States, we have built airplanes, refrigerators and Costco. We dreamed up the microchip and we gave the world chocolate-chip cookies. 

But the greatest American innovation that you won’t ever find on a list of America’s innovations might just be one that you see every day. 

It’s an unsung idea that changed a nation and spread all over the world—and it was driven by one guy.

In the 1950s, around the time Jonas Salk cracked the polio vaccine, a metallurgist named John V. N. Dorr became the champion of a different lifesaver: a white line on the right side of the road.

For years, Dorr told anyone who would listen—and everyone who wouldn’t—about his simple way of making highways safer. A line on the side of the road, he argued, would give drivers somewhere to aim their eyes at night other than oncoming headlights. It was both cheap and incredibly effective, which made it a brilliant investment. Over time, his revolutionary stripe of paint would reach billions of people and guide drivers across the planet.

To this day, you depend on it without knowing anything about it.

“I’ve never found anybody that knew about it,” said Barbara McMillan, Dorr’s great granddaughter. 

It was also unknown to me until I wrote about another ingenious creation...

---

TOPICS: History
KEYWORDS:

[Skid289]

They’re called Bott’s dots after their inventor Herbert Dyson Botts who worked for the CA DOT back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. They used to be attached to the road surface with nails that would eventually pop out and flatten car tires. A student of Bott’s Herb Rooney invented a fast setting super strong adhesive that resulted in them becoming ubiquitous. Except in areas that get a lot of snow where the snowplows just scrape them up.
Here where I live almost every road has grooves cut into the outside lane’s right side to make an audible noise if you drift too far right.
I drift too far right a lot but this is a thread about driving not politics:^)

[Chainmail]

In 1968, I was stationed Camp Pendleton California and the road outside, then Highway 99 and later Highway 5, was a two-lane blacktop road with a single line painted down the middle.

We used to call it "slaughter alley" because the combination of high speed driving, no seat belts, drinking, and the near invisibility of the lane markings at night/rain/fog caused many head-on crashes.

lost 58,000 dead during Vietnam and uncountable thousands to training accidents and motor vehicle crashes during those years.

Thank God for Herbert Botts (and seatbelts, airbags, and the near cessation of drinking and driving).

[Southside_Chicago_Republican]

A clever idea!