Percy Shaw

Percy Shaw, OBE (15 April 1890 – 1 September 1976) was an English inventor and businessman. He patented the reflective road stud or "cat's eye" in 1934, and set up a company to manufacture his invention in 1935.

Percy Shaw inventor of the world-renowned invention, the cats eye, was born in Halifax in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the fourth child and second son of James Shaw, a dyehouse labourer who worked at a local mill, and his second wife Esther Hannah Morrell. Shaw's father also had seven children by his first wife, Jane Brearley, who died in 1883. In 1892, his parents moved their large family to Boothtown in Halifax, where Shaw lived for the rest of his life.

Shaw was educated at Boothtown Board School, and started work as a labourer in a cloth mill at the age of 13. He became apprenticed to a wire drawer, but the low wages on offer were not attractive and he soon took a series of 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 the First World War. After his father's death in 1929, he started his own small business as a road contractor, repairing roads until his death in the 1970s. He received an OBE in 1965.

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, 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.

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