Percy Shaw

Percy Shaw was born in Halifax in 1890, one of a dyehouse labourer\'s many children. He left school at thirteen for a cloth mill, tried an apprenticeship as a wire drawer, and then drifted through unskilled jobs in engineering works. He joined his father repairing machine tools during the First World War, and after his father died in 1929 set up on his own as a road contractor, tarring and patching the roads round Halifax.

He drove home most nights from the Old Dolphin pub at Clayton Heights down the road to Queensbury, a steep road with a drop on one side. He told several versions of what happened next. In one, the glow of a cat\'s eyes on a fence turned him away from the edge in the fog. In another, he had been steering by the reflection from polished tram lines and one night found the tramlines had been taken up. Either way he began building a device that would do the same job from the road surface.

His stud of 1934 set two glass lenses over a mirror in a rubber pad in an iron base. When a wheel ran over it, the pad pressed down and wiped the lenses clean on the way back up. He formed a company in 1935 and sales were slow until the Ministry of Transport approved the stud and the wartime blackout, with every street lamp out, made it a necessity.

He never moved from his house in Boothtown, took out the carpets and curtains, and kept several televisions running at once. He died in 1976.