“The windshield wiper, what a great invention!” These are words that Mary Anderson would never have heard!
When Mary Anderson designed the first swinging arm windshield wiper in 1903 and offered her patent to industrialists, the reception was icy: “we do not consider it to be of such commercial value to justify this acquisition.” For Mary was a visionary! Her invention came much too early for industrialists to understand the interest they could derive from it. Imagine, her invention titled “Window-Cleaning Device for Automobiles and Other Vehicles to Remove Snow, Ice or Sleet from the Window” arrived even before Henry Ford (of the Ford car brand) had manufactured his first car!
Credit: ICEA
But let’s go back to the invention process, which is worthy of an innovation manual: It all starts with an observation, that of a problem: during a visit to New York in the winter of 1903, in a streetcar on an icy, sleety day, she observed that the driver was forced to stop the vehicle to clean the windshield and see where he was driving. After the trip, back in Alabama, in response to the problem she had witnessed, Mary developed a practical solution: a design for a windshield blade that would connect to the inside of the car, allowing the driver to operate the wiper from inside the vehicle. Her device consisted of a lever inside the vehicle that controlled a rubber blade outside the windshield. The lever was operated to bring the spring-loaded arm to move across the windshield. A counterweight was used to ensure contact between the blade and the glass.
She had a prototype made by a local company, then filed a patent application on June 18, 1903. She obtained a 17-year patent on this model. Similar devices had already been proposed but only Mary’s was effective, “only the commercialization stage was a failure. It would indeed take until 1922 for Cadillac to adopt it as” standard equipment; the patent had then fallen into the public domain.
Written by Emmanuelle P.
