New York becomes the first state to require license plates on cars - April 25th, 1901

On this day in 1901, New York became the first state in the U.S. to require license plates on motor vehicles.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show that cruises the highways of history every day of
the week. I'm Gabe Luesier, and today we're examining the
evolution of American license plates from their DIY beginnings to

(00:23):
their digital future. The day was April twenty fifth, nineteen
oh one. New York became the first state in the
US to require license plates on motor vehicles. Prior to that,

(00:45):
all the cars in the country had been unregistered and
could only be identified by law enforcement through physical traits
such as their make, model, and color. The lack of
a registration system wasn't a problem in the late eighteen
high hundreds, there simply weren't that many cars on the road.
But interest in automobiles was steadily rising, and by nineteen

(01:07):
oh one, there were enough of them in New York
State to warrant legislation signed into law by Governor Benjamin
Odell Junior. The Dowdy Bill required owners of motor vehicles
to register with the state and to post identifying marks
on the back of their vehicle. This led to the
development of what we now know as license plates or

(01:31):
vehicle registration plates. To be clear. Motor vehicle tags weren't
a wholly original idea. They had been in use in
France since eighteen ninety three, and other European countries had
followed suit shortly after, but New York's take on the
concept was a bit different, with the original plates looking

(01:52):
nothing like what we're used to today. For starters, the
plates weren't a random string of letters and digits. In fact,
they didn't have numbers at all, but rather the owner's initials.
The plates also weren't issued by the state. Each vehicle
owner had to supply their own, either by making it

(02:12):
themselves or by purchasing a kit. There weren't any restrictions
on materials, style, or color either. Some people mounted house
letters onto plates fashioned from metal, leather, or wood, and
others painted their initials directly onto their vehicles. The only
real requirement was that the letters had to be at

(02:33):
least three inches in height for visibility. The new regulation
placed some additional burden on car drivers, but it was
more than made up for by finally having some acknowledgment
from the government. Most existing traffic laws had been written
before the advent of the automobile, so in the case
of legal disputes with the drivers of horses, car owners

(02:57):
had typically found themselves at a disadvantage. Traffic laws also
varied from one county to the next, which made it
difficult for drivers to know when they were breaking the law.
For example, local authorities that preferred people to travel the
old fashioned way by horse and buggy would sometimes pass
a law banning the use of cars on certain highways

(03:19):
or streets, but there was no way for motorists to
know that until it was too late. Governor Odell's new
act did away with that confusion by making vehicular laws
consistent across the state. It also imposed a speed limit
of eight miles per hour in cities and fifteen miles

(03:39):
per hour in rural areas, placing the owners of motor
vehicles under the same rules as the drivers of horses.
The law was praised by members of the Automobile Club
of America, which had played an instrumental role in the
bill's introduction. Within a week of its passage, seventeen people
had already applied for motor vehicle licenses, and according to

(04:01):
The New York Times, a man named George F. Chamberlain
was the first to receive one. By that September, seven
hundred and fifteen people had registered their cars in New York,
and by April of the following year, the number had
more than doubled. As car ownership continued to rise in
New York, a major flaw emerged in the state's license

(04:24):
plate system. Namely, it was far too easy to cheat
the system by using fake initials or by posting your
real initials without actually registering with the state. Some people
just couldn't bear to part with that one dollar registration fee.
In response, the New York state legislature passed a new

(04:45):
law in nineteen oh three. It assigned each registered vehicle
a number, which then had to be displayed on a
license plate following the letters and why. The state also
decreed that all plates had to adopt a black and
white color scheme, though it would still be up to
the owners to supply the plate itself. That same year,

(05:07):
the first state issued license plates were distributed in Massachusetts.
The very first plate featured just the number one, and
it was issued to Frederick Tudor, the son of a
wealthy Boston ice merchant known as the Ice King. More
than a century later, Tudor's family still holds an active
registration on that lucky number one plate. It took a

(05:31):
while for other states to start producing their own license plates.
New York dragged its feet on the matter until nineteen ten,
but as more and more cars began to crowd the roads,
the need for stricter regulation became impossible to ignore. By
nineteen eighteen, every state in the Union, which was forty
eight at the time, had begun issuing its own vehicle

(05:54):
license plates, and when Alaska and Hawaii joined in nineteen
fifty nine, quickly did the same. By that point, the
plates size and materials had been standardized to the twelve
by six inch aluminum rectangles that were used to seeing today,
although colors, images, and mottos still varied between states. In

(06:17):
recent years, some states have begun experimenting with digital license
plates that use a small flat panel screen to display
a vehicle's info. For now, the technology is mostly suited
to businesses with large vehicle fleets to keep track of,
but as it becomes cheaper and more accessible, electronic plates
may very well become the new standard. It would be

(06:40):
a far cry from the homemade leather tags of old
New York but I guess when it comes to cars,
innovation has always been the name of the game. I'm Gay,
Blues Yay, and hopefully you now know a little more
about history today than you did yesterday. I like to

(07:00):
keep up with the show, You can follow us on Twitter, Facebook,
and Instagram at TDI HC Show, and if you have
any comments or suggestions, feel free to send them my
way by writing to This Day at iHeartMedia dot com.
Thanks to kazb Bias for producing the show, and thanks
to you for listening. I'll see you back here again

(07:21):
tomorrow for another day in History class.