On This Day

Tuesday 3rd April 1934

86 years ago

A British patent application for the first cat's eye road marker was recorded for inventor Yorkshirean Percy Shaw (1889-1975), described as "Improvements relating to Blocks for Road Surface." Cat's eyes consisted (in its original form) of two pairs of reflective glass spheres set into a white rubber dome, mounted in a cast-iron housing. This is the kind that marked the centre of the road, with one pair of cat's eyes showing in each direction. A key feature was the flexible rubber dome that is occasionally deformed by the passage of traffic. A fixed rubber wiper cleans the surface of the reflectors as they sink below the surface of the road. The rubber dome was protected from impact damage by metal 'kerbs' – which also gave tactile and audible feedback for wandering drivers.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, 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. 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 and much of the furniture from his home, and keeping three televisions running constantly (respectively tuned to BBC1, BBC2 and ITV, all with the sound turned down) with a fourth BBC2 in colour. 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