Moving to San Francisco, California, Richard Spikes eventually received a patent pertaining to automobile directional signals, which he installed on a Pierce-Arrow car in 1913.
However, contrary to many sources, Spikes was not the original inventor of this pivotal device, as Percy Douglas-Hamilton was awarded U.S. Patent 912,831 in 1906 for his creation of the first directional signals, six years before Spikes developed his version of the device.
While he was working on his brake testing machine a few years later, the Oakland, California Police Department was interested enough to give it a tryout.
Spikes continued working as a barber, owning and operating shops in San Francisco, Fresno, California and Stockton, California until his eyesight began to fade due to the effects of glaucoma which affected other members of his family, including his brother John, who received a patent for a "writing aid for the blind"—a paper holder, essentially a pad with a clip affixed to it in order to secure sheets of writing paper.
Richard Spikes also kept working; in December 1932, Spikes received a patent for an automatic gear shift device based on automatic transmission for automobiles and other motor vehicles invented in 1904 by the Sturtevant brothers of Boston, Massachusetts.
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