He spent his own money to guide his blind friend

The bumpy yellow tiles at train platforms and crosswalks worldwide started with one man and one friend who was going blind. Seiichi Miyake, an engineer from Japan's Okayama Prefecture, spent his own money in 1965 developing a warning system for pedestrians who navigate by touch, CNN reported. His design had two signals a foot or cane could read: raised dots meant danger ahead, and long parallel bars meant the path was safe. He called them Tenji blocks, after the Japanese word for braille. The first ones went in on March 18, 1967, outside the Okayama School for the Blind. Tokyo and Osaka followed, and within a decade Japan National Railways required them on every platform in the country. Miyake died in 1982, before the United States, Britain and others adopted the tiles in the 1990s. He never learned whether his friend's name would stay private. It did. Roughly 7 million Americans live with vision loss, and every one of them walks on something built for a single person Miyake knew.