In 1903, a woman from Birmingham, Alabama watched streetcar passengers step out to clear rain from the windows by hand, and concluded there was a better way. The automotive industry spent two decades telling her she was wrong.
Her name was Mary Anderson. On November 10, 1903, she received US Patent 743,801 for a hand-operated window cleaning device: a rubber blade mounted on an arm, connected by a lever to a handle inside the vehicle. The driver would pull the lever, the arm would sweep the windshield, and rain would be cleared without leaving the cab. When not in use, the arm could be removed entirely so as not to obstruct the view.
The patent was clear, the mechanism was sound, and the problem was real. Automobile manufacturing companies in Canada and the United States declined to license it. The standard reasoning was that the device would distract drivers — that the sweeping motion would draw the eye more than the rain it was clearing. Anderson let the patent expire in 1920 without ever profiting from it.
The seventeen-year gap
What happened between 1903 and 1920 is a familiar story in invention history: the market was not ready for the solution while the problem was still being discovered. Early automobiles were open-topped, slow, and rare. The windshield as an enclosure for the driver was itself a recent addition. The full inconvenience of rain on enclosed glass had not yet become the shared experience of enough people to create pressure for a solution.
By the time it did, Anderson's patent had lapsed and the field was open.
Charlotte Bridgwood, a theater entrepreneur and investor, filed for US Patent 1,235,422 in 1917: an electrically powered roller-type wiper, which she called the "Storm Windshield Cleaner." The roller mechanism was different from Anderson's blade design and better suited to the curved glass of contemporary vehicles. Bridgwood's company, the Bridgwood Manufacturing Company of New York, marketed it under the trade name "Auto Squeegee." It did not succeed commercially, though it demonstrated that electric power could drive the mechanism without driver intervention.
The Bosch standardization
The windshield wiper became a standard automotive component in 1926, when Robert Bosch GmbH integrated an electric motor directly into a wiper assembly and began supplying it to European automakers as original equipment. The key engineering step was not the motor — that had been demonstrated — but the gear reduction that produced the correct oscillating frequency and the mounting system that held the arm reliably against the glass under speed.
American manufacturers standardized on electric wipers through the late 1920s and early 1930s. By 1940, a car without windshield wipers was a curiosity.
The intermittent wiper and the patent wars
For forty years after standardization, the windshield wiper had one speed, sometimes two. Rain does not fall at a fixed rate, and a wiper running at constant speed in light drizzle produces a rhythmic scraping sound and smears the glass. This was a known annoyance with a known solution — intermittency — that required only a timer circuit to implement.
In 1964, Robert Kearns, an engineering professor at Wayne State University, built an intermittent wiper system in his garage, using a variable resistor and capacitor to delay the wipe cycle. He demonstrated it to Ford Motor Company engineers in 1969. Ford did not license his design. In 1974, Ford introduced intermittent wipers on its vehicles. Kearns sued in 1978.
The case lasted seventeen years. Ford argued the components were all commercially available and the combination was obvious. Kearns argued, successfully, that the combination as an integrated system for a specific application constituted a protectable invention. In 1990, a jury awarded Kearns $10.1 million against Ford. In 1992, Kearns received $30 million from Chrysler in a settlement. Cases against twenty other manufacturers were dropped in 1995.
The intermittent wiper was on virtually every vehicle sold in the United States long before Kearns saw a dollar from it.
What the wiper teaches
Three things emerge from this history that appear repeatedly in the record of mechanical invention.
The first is the gap between invention and adoption that has nothing to do with the quality of the invention. Anderson's 1903 device was adequate. The market that would have valued it did not yet exist at the scale necessary to make licensing attractive. By the time it did, seventeen years had passed.
The second is the tension between individual inventors and corporate adoption that the patent system is theoretically designed to resolve and practically often fails to. Kearns spent two decades of his professional life pursuing companies that had used his work. He won, at significant personal cost, by the time the product in question had become commonplace.
The third is the progressive automation of mechanical tasks until no driver interaction remains. Anderson's device required the driver to pull a lever. Bridgwood's required pressing a switch. Bosch's ran automatically at one speed. Kearns's ran at the right speed for the rain falling at that moment. Rain-sensing systems, introduced in production vehicles in the late 1990s, removed the last decision — the driver no longer chooses when to wipe at all.
Somewhere in that progression, the 1903 lever in Mary Anderson's patent became so thoroughly supplanted that almost no one who uses a rain-sensing wiper knows the problem it descends from, or who first proposed to solve it.
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