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Parliament once called it the most brilliant invention ever produced. 🏴🇬🇧
It was invented by a man who fixed potholes for a living.
On a foggy night in Yorkshire.
Because of a cat.
Percy Shaw was born in Halifax in 1890. One of ten children. Left school at thirteen. Fixed roads for a living.
One foggy night in 1934 he was driving home on a stretch of road he called the death drop. The fog was so thick he couldn’t see the edge. Then two points of light. A cat on a fence. Its eyes reflecting his headlights back through the fog.
He didn’t drive off the edge.
The next morning he started building.
A glass bead in a rubber casing. Set into a cast iron base. When a car drove over it the rubber pressed down and rainwater washed the glass clean.
He patented it in 1934.
Nobody was interested.
Then the war came. Britain switched off every streetlight in the country. The whole country went dark.
Percy Shaw’s cat’s eyes were the only thing keeping people on the roads.
Parliament called it the most brilliant invention ever produced in the interests of road safety.
Orders came in at 40,000 a week.
Percy Shaw became a millionaire. Kept living in his terraced house in Halifax. Removed the carpets. Kept four televisions on in the same room with the sound down. Every Friday friends came round with ale and crisps.
OBE. 1965.
A road mender from Halifax.
Britain has never run out of extraordinary people. It just ran out of people willing to help tell their stories.
This is where they gather.
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