The windshield wiper: the clearest idea nobody wanted

The windshield wiper does not sound like an invention. It is a rubber blade on a metal arm, swept back and forth by a motor most drivers never think about until it squeaks. That plainness is the point. At the start of the twentieth century, a windshield, where a vehicle had one at all, was a pane of glass with no way to clear itself. A Birmingham, Alabama entrepreneur named Mary Anderson solved that problem in 1903 and patented the fix. Her patent ran out in 1920 before she could interest anyone in using it, and she never made money from it.

The problem on the streetcar

Before wipers, snow and sleet stayed on the glass until someone cleared it by hand. On a winter visit to New York City, in 1902 by most accounts, Mary Anderson rode a streetcar whose motorman could barely see through the sleet on his front window. Accounts differ on exactly how he dealt with it. In one, he reached through an opening in the glass every few minutes to wipe it; in another, he stopped the car, got out and cleaned the window by hand.

Anderson made her living in property and farming, not machinery. She moved to Birmingham in 1889, where her family built the Fairmont Apartments, and from 1893 she spent several years running a cattle ranch and vineyard in Fresno, California, before returning to Birmingham. What she brought home from New York was an obvious question nobody had answered: why should anyone have to clear the glass by hand at all?

A handle, a spring and a rubber blade

Anderson's answer was simple enough to sketch on paper. A handle inside the vehicle worked an arm on the outside of the glass, fitted with a wooden strip edged in rubber. Turn the handle, and the arm swept across the window and back. Springs held the rubber against the glass, and an adjustable counterweight kept the motion even. She filed for a patent on June 18, 1903, and on November 10, 1903, was granted U.S. Patent No. 743,801 for a 'window-cleaning device', a simple mechanism, in the patent's words, for removing snow, rain and sleet from the glass in front of the motorman.

We do not consider it to be of such commercial value as would warrant our undertaking its sale.

Dinning and Eckenstein, a Canadian firm, turning down Anderson's patent in 1905

Many who saw the device could not see its value. Some had a more specific objection: a blade sweeping back and forth in front of the driver would be a distraction, not a safety feature.

Inside a modern wiper

The idea Anderson patented, an arm sweeping a rubber edge across the glass, is still the heart of the system. The rest is now automated. A modern wiper works through four parts:

From novelty to standard equipment

Trico, founded in Buffalo in 1917, sold a hand-operated wiper called the Rain Rubber, worked by a handle inside the car. In 1919, William Folberth of Cleveland applied for a patent on a wiper that ran by itself, driven by suction from the engine's intake manifold; he and his brother Fred were granted patents on the design in 1922. Trico later bought the Folberth company to settle a patent dispute between them. By the early 1920s, luxury makers such as Pierce-Arrow and Cadillac were fitting wipers as standard equipment, and the vacuum-powered wiper quickly became standard on cars across the industry.

The wiper's second invention

By the 1960s, wipers had long been standard, and the open question was how often they should run. Robert Kearns, an engineer and onetime Wayne State University professor, had been left legally blind in his left eye by a champagne cork on his wedding night in 1953. In 1963, driving his Ford Galaxie through a light rain, he found the constant sweep of the wipers irritating to his already troubled vision. He modeled a fix on the human eye, which blinks every few seconds rather than continuously: a wiper that pauses between sweeps. He filed his first patent on December 1, 1964, and was granted U.S. Patent No. 3,351,836 on November 7, 1967.

Kearns took his idea to Ford. By his account, Ford's engineers were interested, but the company declined to license it. Ford then offered its own intermittent wiper as an option on its Mercury line, beginning with the 1969 models.

Kearns sued Ford for patent infringement in 1978. In 1990 a federal jury in Detroit found in his favor and awarded him $5.1 million, and Ford paid $10.2 million, including interest and costs, to settle. He sued Chrysler in 1982, argued much of that case himself, even questioning witnesses on the stand, and won a verdict in 1992. The court entered a judgment of about $18.7 million, including interest, and in 1995 the Supreme Court declined to hear Chrysler's appeal. By then he had spent more than $10 million on legal fees. His fight became a 1993 New Yorker article, 'The Flash of Genius', and the 2008 film Flash of Genius.

Still the simplest fix on the car

Every chapter of that story, the handle Anderson patented, the vacuum motor that faltered at full throttle, the pause Kearns spent decades in court over, came back to the same goal: letting a driver see the road. A modern wiper does that job with a motor, a linkage, its arms and a park switch, faster and more precisely than any version that came before it.

Keep it coveredYour wipers look after the glass. A cover matched to your exact car looks after the rest of it.