Cat's eyes: How a pub trip made the world's roads safer
In 1934, the late Percy Shaw almost crashed while driving home from the pub on a foggy night in West Yorkshire, in England.
He was saved when his headlights were reflected in the eyes of a cat and it gave him a brilliant idea. He invented reflective studs for the road and called them cat’s eyes.
Invention
Shaw was inventive, even at an early age, but his most famous invention was the cat's eye for lighting the way along roads in the dark. There are several stories about how he came up with the idea. The most famous involves him driving down the difficult road (Queensbury Road, part of the A647 with a very steep drop to one side) from the Old Dolphin public house in Clayton Heights to his home in Halifax, when a cat on a fence along the edge of the road looked at the car and reflected his headlights back to him, allowing him to take corrective action and remain on the road.
In an interview with Alan Whicker, however, he told a different story of being inspired on a foggy night to think of a way of moving the reflective studs on a road sign to the road surface. Further, local schoolchildren who were taken on visits to the factory in the late 1970s were told that the idea came from Shaw seeing light reflected from his car headlamps by tram tracks in the road on a foggy night. The tram tracks were polished by the passing of trams and by following the advancing reflection, it was possible to maintain the correct position in the road.
In 1934, he patented his invention (patents Nos. 436,290 and 457,536), based on the 1927 reflecting lens patent of Richard Hollins Murray. A year later, Reflecting Roadstuds Ltd was formed to manufacture the devices. Sales were initially slow, but approval from the Ministry of Transport and the blackout in the Second World War gave a huge boost to production and the firm, located near Shaw's home in Boothtown, grew in size making more than a million roadstuds a year, which were exported all over the world.
A later patent added a rainwater reservoir to the rubber shoe, which could be used to wash the glass "eyes" when a car drove over the stud. Such a success was the invention of the "cat's eye" that he was rewarded with an OBE for services to exports in the birthday honours list in 1965.
He became eccentric in later life, removing the carpets, curtains and much of the furniture from his isolated home, and keeping four televisions running constantly (respectively tuned to BBC1, BBC2 and ITV, all with the sound turned down) with a fourth showing BBC2 in colour. On each Friday a few friends would come to the house and Percy would supply crates of bottled ale and boxes of potato crisps. He told Alan Whicker that the reason for keeping the TVs on simultaneously was so that his friends could watch whichever of the then existing channels they chose to, and there would be no arguments. One luxury was his Rolls-Royce Phantom.
He never married and he died from cancer and heart disease at Boothtown Mansion, Halifax, where he had lived for all but two of his 86 years. Despite rumours of a personal fortune, his personal estate was admitted to probate in December 1976 at a value of £193,500. He was an agnostic, but his funeral was held at Boothtown Methodist Church, and he was cremated in Elland.
In 2005, he was listed as one of the 50 greatest Yorkshire people in a book by Bernard Ingham.
Credit: Wikipedia