Posted on 04/16/2021 5:20:21 PM PDT by SamAdams76
Of course, you all know the story of how kids come into this world, so we won’t get into that right now. We will, however, get into a school bus – metaphorically – and travel through history to have a quick look at how school buses came to be.
School buses are used to transport kids from various locations to the schools they attend. The need for them arose from the fact that there were no means of transport linking certain areas to certain schools, or from the fact that public transport as we know it is not all that safe for youngsters.
To be noted before getting into it is the fact that, despite several countries now operating buses with the sole purpose of taking kids to school, it was the good old America that set the trend. Furthermore, few countries except for the U.S. and Canada use purpose-built buses for this task.
Back in late 19th century, people went to school primarily by foot. Lucky ones resorted from time to time to horse-drawn carriages known as kid hacks. And no, a hack is not a computer-related term here, but is short for hackney carriage.
Kid hacks were usually capable of transporting around 20 children, loaded through the back as not to scare the animals drawing the carriage.
Hacks were out pretty much as quickly as they rose, as the increasing number of horseless carriages being developed soon led to the creation of the school bus. For a time, however, a mixture of carriage and bus was used: wooden bodies which were mounted on regular trucks, which could be detached when the machine was used for something other than transporting pupils.
In the early days of kid hacks, one of the main manufacturers of such means of transportation was Wayne Works. Their first venture into this market came following a request received in 1892 from a school in Ohio, which asked for a purpose-built carriage.
The resulting product, called School Car, was a horse-drawn carriage that featured a cabin with perimeter seating on wooden benches.
In 1902, a fire destroyed the Wayne Works facility and forced the company to rebuild a new one, this time with the goal of producing bodies for motorized cars. And for a while, they did just that.
In 1910, Wayne ventured once again in the education industry with the launch of the motorized School Car. This is the first documented release of a school bus built on the chassis of an automobile. As opposed to its precursor, it had padded seats instead of wooden benches.
Over the ages, until its demise in mid-1990s, Wayne Works will have a major say in the way in which school buses are designed today.
Today, one of the largest school bus manufacturers in the U.S. is the Blue Bird Corporation. The company came to be in the late 1920s after Ford dealership owner and industrialist A.L. Luce decided to manufacture a bus body for the Model T.
The idea popped into Luce’s head after being asked by one of his customers to build a wooden body for the Model T so that he could transport workers to and fro. Being made of wood, the body of the truck did not last long and was lost to the elements.
Having learned a lesson, Luce decided to use steel as panels for the body. He also used roll-up canvas side curtains for windows.
Soon, his idea laid the stepping stone for others to follow in his footsteps. So many companies began rolling their own buses, that a building standard was needed.
In 1939, American educator Frank W. Cyr decided to do something to provide some rules for school bus manufacturers, so he organized the first-ever conference on school transportation.
The conference followed years of research he conducted that showed kids all over America were traveling to school in an incomprehensible variation of buses or even coaches from the old days. He was upset with the uneven coloring, age, and state in which these vehicles presented themselves.
So, in 1939, he summoned at Teachers College at the Columbia University transportation officials from across the U.S. and representatives of the companies building such buses. The conference, being funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, drew them all there.
They talked, debated and then talked again before all agreeing on 44 standards to be applied to all school buses. They would govern body length, height, aisle width and so on.
Most of these standards have changed since, but at least one remained: the yellow.
Officially, the color used on the buses is called National School Bus Chrome. It was chosen because black lettering on yellow background was said to be the easiest to spot in semidarkness and is noticed the quickest by peripheral vision.
As soon as these standards were in place, school districts began buying and operating their own fleets. As the number of students rose, the size of the trucks increased as well. As safety features were invented, they made they way into school buses.
As per a report by American School Bus Council, there are now around 480,000 school buses operating in the U.S. They carry 25 million children, making this operation one of the largest form of mass transit in the country.
Gotta add in the short bus, dude
You know the jokes are coming
Nothing about the significance of the three black lines down the sides?
They come shorter than that.
Oh yeah...black and yellow and red all over...
Here's a picture of me long ago going TO school...
Here's a picture of me the same day after school got out on the way home FROM school...
One of my frat bros used to be chief engr at Blue Bird down in south Georgia. They were a long time family owned outfit that got sold to venture cap (Cerberus) and looted and pillaged several times.
I swear, when I saw the title my brain interpreted it initially as “History of the Short Yellow School Bus”!
It made me jump in and take a look...:)
Nothing in the article says why “yellow”.
One of my favorite stories involving a school bus was when I was in CYO back in the Seventies, and we took a bus to a band competition in Somerville, just outside Boston.
One of the things that was fun as an adolescent boy was that everyone had to change into their uniforms, and...there were no curtains to hide behind, so although they often made the guys change into the uniforms outside the bus while the gals changed inside the bus, there was enough intermingling that made it quite entertaining.
Even more so when we were late, and everyone had to get changed INSIDE the bus as it drove up.
Anyway, the bus was parked and the back door (four or five feet off the ground) was open with kids climbing in and out.
One kid climbed into the door on the back and saw a heavyset black gal named “Chandra” getting into her uniform, and she had just put some talcum powder on because it was the end of July, sticky and hot.
The kid grabbed the talcum power and squeezed off a round of white powder that landed on her, and exclaimed “Look! Now you’re white!”
She grabbed the large container out of his hands, and squeezed off a great big round right back at his face.
Unfortunately for him, the top popped off the container because she squeezed it so hard, and the entire container went into his face, eyes, nose, and mouth.
He was blinded and couldn’t breathe...he turned and stumbled out the back of the bus and promptly fell face first to the asphalt below.
They had to call an ambulance to take him away, and it took him a few weeks to recover.
We talk about that today, and while we laugh at the stupid kid who initiated it, we all agreed nobody in their right mind would mess with Chandra, and especially not like that!
Only 2 horsepower but probably not getting stuck in the snow?
Wayne Works was in Richmond IN. It used to be one of those factories everybody wanted to get into. We’d drive past the factory along I-70 and in the summer the fields around the factory were lined with buses.
My dad worked there briefly as an electrician.
My semi-invalid uncle was still able to drive and often delivered the finished buses.
“Nothing in the article says why “yellow”.”
Do you remember when the Ryder trucks were painted yellow? It was a safety issue. Yellow stands out better than other colors and is noticed easier.
From the article:
“Most of these standards have changed since, but at least one remained: the yellow.
Officially, the color used on the buses is called National School Bus Chrome. It was chosen because black lettering on yellow background was said to be the easiest to spot in semidarkness and is noticed the quickest by peripheral vision.”
We lived in a hole in the road!
We DREAMED of a tarpaulin!
I’m surprised not to see a mention that the color “National School Bus Chrome” was because the pigment was lead(II) chromate (PbCrO4), a rather toxic pigment.
From the article.....
“Officially, the color used on the buses is called National School Bus Chrome. It was chosen because black lettering on yellow background was said to be the easiest to spot in semidarkness and is noticed the quickest by peripheral vision.”
Never go full retard on the short bus.
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