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Percy Shaw
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Percy Shaw was born in Halifax in West Yorkshire in 1890, the son of Jimmy Shaw, a dyer’s labourer, who worked at a local mill. When he was 14, he worked as a road mender. He patented the reflective road stud (cat's eye).
Shaw was inventive, even at a young age, but his most famous invention was the catseye for lighting the way along roads in the dark.
There are several stories about how he came up with the idea. The most famous is that a cat on a fence along the edge of a road looked at the car, reflected his headlights back to him, allowing him to take corrective action and remain on the road. However, in an interview, he tells a different story of being inspired by a reflective road sign on a foggy night. Further, local school children 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.
Whatever the truth, in 1934, he patented his invention (patent No. 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. The wartime blackout gave a huge boost to production and the firm, located in Boothtown, grew in size making more than a million roadstuds a year, which were exported all over the world. They are now replaced on many roads by reflective plastic.
Such a success was the invention of the "cat's eye" that in 1965 he was rewarded with an OBE for services to exports.
He never married and he died on 1 September 1976 at Boothtown Mansion, where he had lived for all but two of his 86 years.
In 2005, he was listed as one of the 50 greatest Yorkshire people in a book by Bernard Ingham[1]