Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff. Lauren Vogelbaum here. Back in the year nineteen hundred, there were just four thousand, one hundred and ninety two motor vehicles in the United States, but every year the number of cars skyrocketed. By nineteen oh eight, it was sixty three thousand, five hundred. As of twenty twenty one, it
was some two hundred and eighty two million. As automobiles grew in popularity, eventually replacing the horse and buggy, state governments needed a way to keep tabs on vehicles and their owners. The simple license plate was the solution for the article. This episode is based on How Stuffworks. Spoke via email with Ian Lang, a senior car advice editor at the online car resource bumper dot com. He explained New York became the first state to require owners to
register their motor vehicles with the state. The New York legislature required vehicle registration on April twenty fifth of nineteen oh one, followed by California later that year. It was Massachusetts that actually issued its first license plates in nineteen oh three. New York's first plates were homemade, bearing only the owner's initials without any numbers, and France actually beat all of them to the punch, with motor vehicle tags
issued as early as eighteen ninety three. In fact, all the way back in seventeen eighty three, King Louis the sixteenth mandated that carriage drivers in Paris have metal plates with their names and addresses fixed on their carriages. Lang said by nineteen eighteen, license plates had been issued by all forty eight contiguous states. It was common for early plates to have just the state's name or abbreviation, a
registration number, and more often than not, the year. These plates were made out of either leather or metal and were not very standardized from state to state. Some of these have become collector's items. In August of twenty twenty two, the very first license plate issued in Illinois went up for auction, fetching a whopping price of thirty four thousand dollars. The plate was supplied by the local government of Chicago in nineteen oh four and fittingly bears the number one
in a bold font. Initially, license plates were issued to last the life of the vehicle, but by the nineteen twenties, registration renewal became a thing Lang said. During this time, states began experimenting with different methods of creating license plates. Typically, the front of the registration card plate would have the registration number in large, centered numbers, while the back would have the abbreviated name of the state and a two
or four digit year of validity. Around the nineteen fifties, license plate size and materials began to be standardized to what we see today. After nineteen fifty six, all American as well as Canadian plates measured exactly six by twelve inches that's fifteen by thirty centimeters. In nineteen fifty four, the Vehicle Identification number or VIN was also introduced as a reliable method of tying registration documents to a particular car.
So what do the numbers unlicensed plates mean today? US states use many different conventions when it comes to assigning plate numbers, and many states do it randomly. Others, like Idaho, designate numbers and letters based on the county where the plates are issued. The digits in letters are usually embossed and painted, though some states have moved toward completely flat metal plates. Each state offers designs with local slogans or symbols serving as the backdrop, perhaps a local plant, a
famous landmark, or a historical figure. Some states require tags at both the front and rear of the vehicle, while others issue only the rear plate. And of course, there are also plenty of custos vanity plate options that allow drivers to pick designs that are meaningful to them and to choose their own characters that create words or phrases,
as long as they don't spell out profanity. Elang explained the majority of passenger vehicles today have license plates with six or seven characters, but some states allow vanity plates with a maximum of eight characters. In addition, most states do not allow letters IO and Q because they're too easily confused with zero in one. For many decades, the Department of Motor Vehicles system has used prison labor to
meet the constant demand for new license plates. Elang said it's estimated that eighty percent of license plates in the United States are produced in prisons. In prisons, the actual metal plates are stamped, then the plastic sheeting is applied. Several prisons manufacture plates for multiple states. Just for one example, all of California's plates are cut and stamped out of aluminium.
In a facility at Fulsoon State Penitentiary. The plant uses around one hundred and twenty inmates to churn out over forty five thousand license plates a day, consuming fifteen thousand pounds that's six eight hundred kilos of sheet metal in the process. Many advocacy groups, including the ACLU, have decried the use of prison labor in the United States. After all, inmates frequently make less than a dollar per hour on the job, even if the skills they learned there might
help them in the future. We wanted to mention it here, but of course prison labor and other practices could be a whole series of episodes or a whole different series entirely. But back to license plates. The majority of plates issued to date have been hunks of lifeless, unchanging metal, but recently electronic plates have been introduced in states like California, Arizona, Michigan, and Texas. This new variety is a small flat panel
screen roughly the same size as additional plate. It can either be hardwired into a vehicle's electrical system or supplied with an internal battery that will last about five years. The company responsible for these digital plates, Reviver, says that they're more convenient than the traditional plate because you can update vehicle registration online and see the change reflected on
the digital plate screen. However, this does come at a subscription charge of nineteen ninety five a month or two hundred and fifteen dollars and forty cents for four years, and that's an addition to the fees charged by states for vehicle registration. If you want the plate hardwired, that requires an extra installation cost. Since you can renew or change out your metal tag for less money, digital tags probably hold more appeal for commercial enterprises that have to
keep track of several vehicles at one time. Businesses could also monitor locations and mileage on their fleet with these plates. But even if digital plates take off with consumers, you'll probably will you be seeing the old pieces of stamped aluminum on American roads for many years to come. Today's episode is based on the article The Long Strange History of license plates in the US on how Stuffworks dot com,
written by Talen Homer. The brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how Stuffworks dot com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts from my Heart Radio visit the iHeartRadio, app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.