Biography

Every industry has a moment of origin. Ours has Carl Magee.

Born in Iowa in 1873, Magee was a journalist and lawyer who spent his early career making trouble for powerful people. As a newspaper editor in New Mexico, he helped uncover one of the greatest political scandals in American history — the Teapot Dome affair — which sent a sitting Cabinet secretary to prison for the first time in U.S. history.

By 1927, Magee had landed in Oklahoma City to run a newspaper. And there, amid booming oil fields and streets choked with automobiles, he encountered a new kind of problem. Downtown workers were parking all day, leaving no spaces for customers. Merchants were losing business. The city needed a solution.

Magee conceived one: a coin-operated timing device, mounted at each parking space, that would charge drivers for their time and free the curb for the next arrival. He filed his first patent in 1932, sponsored an engineering contest to refine the design, and on July 16, 1935, 175 meters were installed across fourteen blocks of downtown Oklahoma City. The cost: five cents an hour.

Within three days, merchants on the other side of the street were demanding meters too.

By the early 1940s, more than 140,000 meters stood on American streets. Today, that number is in the tens of millions worldwide. It all began with one man's solution to one city's problem.