Percy Shaw

Percy Shaw (1890 - 1 September, 1976) was an English inventor who patented the reflective road stud cat's eye.

Biography

Shaw was born in Halifax in West Yorkshire, the son of James Shaw, a dyehouse labourer, who worked at a local mill. When he was 13, he was started work as a labourer in a cloth mill. He became apprenticed to a wire drawer, but the low wages on offer were not attractive and he soon took a series unskilled jobs in local engineering works. He was thus well placed to join his father in a new business repairing small machine tools used in munitions production during World War 1. After his father's death in 1929 he started his own small business as a road contractor.

Invention

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. 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 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.

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, Halifax, 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

References

• Hargreaves, John A (2004). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

External links

• Halifax Today article on Percy Shaw
• Catseye Patent GB457536 (Improvements relating to blocks for road surface marking)