From homemade signs to soybean plates, the odd history of number plates
The first registration plates were so fragile that few survive, and early American drivers often had to make their own. Wartime shortages pushed makers to try copper and even pressed soybeans. Today a humble strip of aluminium is designed to be read at a glance by people and cameras alike.
France led the way with a Paris police ordinance on 14 August 1893, Germany followed in 1896, and the Netherlands introduced the first nationwide plate in 1898, numbering vehicles in sequence from 1 until a change in 1906. New York demanded only that owners' initials be visible from 1901 and required plates from 1903, the same year Massachusetts became the first state to issue them. Idaho put the first logo on a plate in 1928, a potato. Spain's first plate, PM–1, went on a Clément-Talbot in Palma de Mallorca on 31 October 1900.
Early plates of enamel on metal or ceramic broke easily, and experiments included cardboard and leather. Modern ones are mostly aluminium, either pressed between character dies or built up by riveting letters on one at a time. Because sizes varied so much, moving or reselling a car could mean drilling new holes in the bumper, until manufacturers, governments and standards bodies agreed on common formats in 1957.
Four main sizes now dominate. Much of Europe uses a long, narrow plate 520 millimetres wide; the Mercosur countries of South America use 400; Australia and parts of the Pacific Rim sit between at 372; and most of North and Central America use a compact 300 by 150. A 1960 University of Illinois study recommended characters legible at roughly 125 feet in daylight and a wider standard plate so longer numbers would not be squeezed.
Legibility doubles as security. From the 1920s some places designed typefaces that resist painting one character into another, and many have adopted the FE-Schrift font since the 1990s. Mixing letters and digits freely creates confusion between O and 0, so a driver could be blamed for someone else's offence. Rules differ on whether a plate follows the car or the owner, and in 2018 Michigan made electronic plates legal.
Source: Vehicle registration plate
