This Week’s Classic Car History Highlight – The Windshield Wiper

This week Greg Kinnear hit the talk show circuit promoting his new movie "Flash of Genius" were he plays Robert Kearns, a professor who invented the intermittent windshield wipers.

The movie is based on a true story of Kearn’s claims that Detroit automakers stole his idea and sued them in a long, drawn-out battle. So we started wondering who invented the first windshield wiper and were very surprised where our research lead us.

During the winter of 1903, before Henry Ford's Model A was being manufactured, a woman named Mary Anderson was touring New York in a streetcar. She watched how the shivering driver had to get out constantly and wipe the snow and sleet from his windshield. It is reported that later that day, Mary Anderson scribbled a drawing of what would become the first successful windshield wiper system.

Her device let the driver stay inside the streetcar to clean the windshield by using a lever from the inside to manually activate "a swinging arm that mechanically swept off the ice and snow," according to the Inventors Museum (www.inventorsmuseum.com). Mary never sold her idea, but the mechanical wipers became standard features on American cars, including Ford's Model T, by 1913.

Another female automotive pioneer, Charlotte Bridgwood, president of the Bridgwood Manufacturing Company of New York, patented her electric roller-based windshield wiper called the "Storm Windshield Cleaner" in 1917. However, her product was not a commercial success.

According to our colleagues who write about inventors at About.com, the automobile gave women ample opportunity for invention:

“In 1923, of the 345 inventions listed under "Transportation" in the Women's Bureau Bulletin No.28, about half were related to automobiles and another 25 concerned traffic signals and turn indicators. Among these inventions - a carburetor, a clutch mechanism, an electric engine starter, and a starting mechanism.”

Now that’s what we call girl power!