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One Simple Idea Has Quietly Saved Millions Of Lives Over The Last 70 Years

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John Van Nostrand Dorr was already a household name when he changed the world. A protégé since he was just 16 of one Thomas Edison, and founder and namesake of the Dorr Foundation for almost a decade, Dorr’s name was a mainstay of chemical engineering journals and patent offices the world over.

But it was nothing so academic or technical that truly secured his legacy. Rather, it was a simple white line, painted on the outermost edges of roads and highways – one that, to date, has likely saved millions of lives.<br>And you’ve probably never even really noticed it.<br>Before the idea<br>Born in 1872, John Dorr had been interested in geology and metallurgy ever since he was a little kid. He had something of a rough-and-tumble education: taught by his mother, a schoolteacher, he spent his formative years hiking through New Jersey to explore his home state’s numerous iron and copper mines, sleeping under haystacks and collecting any “specimens” that caught his eye.<br>By the time he was 16 or 17, he was working at Edison’s West Orange laboratory. His job title: “pioneer”.

“As a teenage lab assistant, Dorr learned a lesson from the master himself,” wrote The Wall Street Journal’s Ben Cohen last week. “Try anything once.”

From West Orange, he went on to Rutgers University, where he studied...