Cat's Eyes: a Safety Device, really?
Road studs, also known as cats’ eyes, are retroreflective safety devices designed to be used on poorly lit roads to provide effective night guidance. By reflecting your car's headlights, they enable you to clearly perceive road curves and corners from a distance even under the worst weather conditions.
The ever-increasing popularity of cars and buses, which ultimately rendered trams obsolete, was the beginning of it all; however, tram lines' laborious removal process would end up leading them to have a very different outcome.
With almost no public street or road lighting back then, tram lines’ polished rails ended up performing a very important function: by reflecting the headlights of passing cars and buses, they unintentionally assisted drivers in navigating at night.
By the time when tram lines started to be removed, Percy Shaw (from Halifax in England) realised that this night-time guide to traffic would have to be replaced by some other form of reflective device and that was when the cats' eyes idea was born. As for its naming, Shaw came up with it by associating the device with the eye shine reflecting from the eyes of a cat.
Shaw would end up patenting its invention in 1934 and, on the 15th of March 1935, he founded Reflecting Road studs Limited in Halifax to manufacture the product.
From the UK to the world, the cat's eye's original design consisted of two pairs of retroreflective lenses (which Richard Hollins Murray had created six years earlier for use in advertising signs) that set into a white rubber dome encapsulated in a cast iron housing.
This rubber dome, which is meant to be occasionally deformed by the passage of traffic, includes a fixed rubber wiper that with each deformation cleans the surface of the reflectors when these sink below the surface of the road. The fact that rainwater is eventually collected there, makes the cleaning procedure considerably more efficient.
To make this device sturdier, this rubber dome is shielded by metal 'kerbs' which also double up as tactile and audible feedback for any lane-wandering driver.
This original design, which is still being used to this day as marks in the centre of the road, with a pair of cat’s eyes facing out in each opposite direction took several years of trial and error to perfect. Later on, came the single-ended one, which would end up becoming widely used as lane dividers and road margins in many different colours.
In the UK, different coloured cats' eyes are used to denote different situations:
1) White
2) Red and amber
3) Green
Modern cat's eyes are solar-powered and use an amber or red LED to signal hazardous areas to oncoming traffic worldwide.
The World War II blackouts gave Shaw's inventions the boost they needed to become widely used, and this, together with the fact that they have shown to be especially helpful in fog circumstances and exceptionally resistant to damage by snow ploughs, has contributed to their widespread adoption in the UK.
This ultimately led to the Ministry of Transport committee, headed by James Callaghan and Sir Arthur Young, giving Reflecting Roadstuds Limited their full support, which resulted in the cats’ eys adoption around the globe.
Cat’s eyes history is not all smooth sailing though… on the morning of the 25th of April in 1999, on the M3 motorway in Hampshire (UK), a van dislodged the steel body of a road stud which ended up flying through the windscreen of a following car hitting the female passenger in the face, killing her instantly.
This would end up being recorded as an accidental death but the investigators did acknowledge that the cat’s eyes' bodies occasionally can become loose but such an outcome has never been heard of.
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