UK NEWS

The Cat and the Middle (of the Road)

When the Yorkshire born inventor, Percy Shaw, was driving to Bradford in dense fog in 1933, he narrowly avoided going over a precipice, when the beam of his headlights reflected in the eyes of a cat sitting on a roadside fence. This close escape gave Shaw an idea that would make him famous. He rightly decided that something either in or on the road was necessary to help drivers steer in the dark. He therefore developed a device which consisted of a mirror and a spherical lens mounted in a rubber pad. The pad was in turn set in the centre of a cast-iron well which was designed to be sunk into the surface of the road. The crucial feature of this reflective device was that every time a car’s wheel passed over the rubber pad it would be forced into its iron base and the lens would thereby be wiped clean by the rubber, in the manner of an eye and an eyelid.

After a year of experiments, Shaw patented his invention and then laid fifty of his reflective studs, at his own expense, at a notorious accident blackspot near Bradford. A year later, in 1935, he formed a company, Reflecting Roadstuds Ltd, to manufacture the studs. The success of Shaw’s idea was eventually guaranteed when, in 1937, the UK’s Ministry of Transport ran a competition to identify the best road reflector. After two years only Shaw’s device remained in working condition, the others having fractured or ceased to reflect.

Of course, when thinking of a name for his product, Shaw returned to his original inspiration. He therefore called his device the Catseye road reflector. With the passage of time, this name has become extremely well known, at least in the UK. Further, from the nature of its use by the public, you would think that it had entered into the language as a generic term for such road reflectors. Indeed, the term “cat’s eyes” appears in Roget’s Thesaurus, whilst “Cat’s-eye” is found in the Oxford English Dictionary. Care should be exercised, however, before making such assumptions. On closer inspection, the OED states that Cats-eye is a proprietary name and this is confirmed by a review of the UK and CTM registers where Catseye (one word) is found to be protected in Classes 6, 9 and 17 and in the ownership of Shaw’s original company, Reflecting Roadstuds Ltd.

Unlike many inventors, Percy Shaw reaped the benefit of his idea during his own lifetime. Although he never married and never left his native Yorkshire, he will always be remembered by many for his outstanding contribution to road safety.