A childhood belief about traffic lights

Traffic lights always baffled me as a child with their mysterious powers of regulating the roadways. I used to believe that at every traffic light there was a man who worked in those little boxes on telephone poles whose job it was to watch the cars and press buttons to make the lights green when the roads were clear, and turn them red when he felt the cars should stop. Hour after hour, every day. It wasn't until when I was about six during a trip to Washington DC, I saw their traffic lights were horizontally placed, and somehow discerned from this that there could not be any little man in a little box somewhere regulating traffic, and I had been wrong all those years...