Percy Shaw came up with his most famous invention, the ‘Cat’s Eye’
On a foggy night in Yorkshire 85 years ago, Percy Shaw was driving home near his native Boothtown, near Halifax in England. Usually, in fog, he could follow the tramlines in the road shining in the reflection of his car headlights, but that night in December 1933 the tramlines had been taken up for repairs and Percy almost veered off the road.
Suddenly a pair of bright cat’s eyes stared at him in his headlights. It was a Eureka moment. Percy realized that reflectors in the road could guide drivers at night, whatever the weather. The following year he patented the cat’s eye, using glass bead reflectors wrapped in a rubber casing and an iron box embedded in the road.
Shaw suggested in his patent that different colors of reflector could be used to indicate different levels of road hazards. Today varying colors are used on motorways to indicate junctions.
When a vehicle drove over the reflector, the rubber and glass beads were pushed down below the road surface, and it was self-cleaning – the iron shoe filled with rainwater, and pushing the top down made the rubber squirt water and clean the cat’s eye.
Shaw’s company, still in operation today, exported the product all over the world and the Boothtown factory developed into a 20-acre site.
Unchanged for many years it is only in fairly recent times that new variations have been tried – using different materials and testing out solar-powered and ‘intelligent’ Cat’s eyes which can transmit signals to vehicles.
Sources:
- https://youtu.be/pL2EHODKvYE
- https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/dec/03/weatherwatch-percy-shaw-and-the-invention-of-the-cats-eye-reflector
- https://www.mylearning.org/stories/inventors-and-inventions-from-yorkshire/304
- https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/5787099
- https://us-east-2.console.aws.amazon.com/polly/home/SynthesizeSpeech
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