This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we continue here with our American stories, and our next story comes to us from a man

whose YouTube videos are followed by hundreds

of thousands of viewers of all ages. He's known simply as the history guy. We spend a lot of

time telling stories about the past, and that's every kind of story about the past, because

if you don't know who you are, well, you can't know who you're going to be.

And so much of the story of who we are is the story of the past.

And so that's why we spend a lot of time on history.

So here's the history guy with the story he calls centerline, the surprising history of lane marking.

When Americans first started driving automobiles,

we really hadn't set up rules or laws to operate the things safely.

In fact, for most of many decades, there wasn't even a line down the center of the road

to delineate the lanes.

In the fall of 1917, Dr. June McCarroll was driving her Ford Model T down the road near Indio, California when she was run off the road by a truck.

She later said of the event,

My Model T Ford and I found ourselves face to face with a truck on a paved highway.

It didn't take me long to choose between the Sandy Berth to the right and the 10-ton truck to the left.

And that's when I had my idea, putting a white line down the center of the highways and the 10-ton truck to the left. And that's what I had my idea,

pending a white line down the center of the highways of the country as a safety measure.

The California Department of Transportation credits Dr. McCarroll with the idea of painting a center line,

but she wasn't actually the first to have that idea. You know, today that line down the middle,

the hundreds of thousands

...