Question: Why are school buses yellow?
Answer: Because a professor from rural Nebraska hung 50 paint swatches on a wall and made people choose. Before 1939, kids got to school in whatever a district could scrape together, including horse-drawn wagons, and some towns painted their buses red, white, and blue to stir up a little patriotism. Frank Cyr thought that was a safety problem, so he gathered officials from all 48 states and had them pick the shade that jumped out fastest at dawn and dusk. The winner was a yellow-orange that also happens to make black lettering easy to read from a distance. As Cyr put it years later, all that red, white, and blue was really just camouflage.
