A closer look
Sleeping policemen were the original colloquial term for the massive concrete speed bumps invented by physicist Arthur Holly Compton in 1953 to slow down campus traffic; he was deeply annoyed by cars speeding past the Washington University buildings in St. Louis and endangering students, so he designed the violent asphalt mounds to force compliance; the invention was aggressively simple, relying entirely on the threat of destroying a vehicle suspension and ruining the driver spine to maintain neighborhood safety; it is quite a legacy to be a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who helped design the atomic bomb, yet be equally remembered for creating the most universally hated obstacle in every suburban strip mall parking lot
