Feature Carveyance

Blame It on the Rain

A lip-synced megahit, a forgotten patent, a one-eyed professor, and a hundred years of the most underrated safety device on your car. The surprisingly dramatic — and deeply unjust — human history of the windshield wiper.

Engineering & History  ·  1903–Today  ·  The Lone Inventor vs. the Machine

Picture the worst of it. You’re doing seventy on the interstate, it has been raining for an hour, and a semi blows past on your left and throws a wall of water across your windshield. For about half a second — maybe less — the world simply goes. No lane, no truck, no road, just a grey smear of moving water and the sound of your own heartbeat. Then a thin black blade sweeps across the glass, the road snaps back into hard focus, and you exhale, already forgetting it happened.

That half-second of blindness, and the thing that ends it, is the most underrated piece of safety equipment bolted to your car. You will use it a hundred times this week without a single conscious thought — a strip of rubber dragged across glass by a little motor, so ordinary it has gone invisible. Which is precisely why almost nobody knows that it carries one of the strangest, most dramatic, and most genuinely unjust histories in the entire automobile. To tell it properly, though, we have to begin somewhere odd. We have to begin with a pop song.

On the 21st of July, 1989, in front of a sun-soaked crowd at Lake Compounce amusement park in Bristol, Connecticut, the pop duo Milli Vanilli walked on stage for the Club MTV tour, launched into their colossal hit “Girl You Know It’s True,” and accidentally blew up their own careers in real time. Mid-song, the backing track jammed and began to skip, looping the same three words over and over — “girl you know it’s, girl you know it’s, girl you know it’s” — and the word “true,” rather pointedly, never came.

Rob Pilatus, realizing the entire crowd was now watching a vocal track sing without him, panicked and bolted off the stage; MTV’s “Downtown” Julie Brown had to chase him down backstage and coax him back out. The audience, weirdly, barely cared. But the thread had been pulled. A year later, producer Frank Farian confessed that Rob and Fab Morvan hadn’t sung a single note on the record — the voices belonged to session singers — and Milli Vanilli became the first and only act ever stripped of a Grammy. A global phenomenon, built entirely on taking credit for work someone else did, fell apart the instant the truth skipped into the open. And the detail you could not invent if you tried: one of their actual hit singles was called Blame It on the Rain.

Hold onto that, because this is a story about credit — about who gets remembered for the work, and who gets driven straight past. It’s an imperfect mirror, I’ll grant you. Milli Vanilli are the villains of their story; the people you’re about to meet are the heroes of theirs. They seized a spotlight they hadn’t earned and drowned in it. The inventors of the windshield wiper earned a spotlight and had it taken away — not by accident, and not by bad luck, but by a pattern that repeats so precisely across a century that it stops looking like coincidence. It is, again and again, the same fight: a lone inventor — usually a woman, once an obsessive professor — against the machine. Against an industry perfectly happy to wait for a patent to lapse, fit the idea to every car it built, and keep the money. So let’s blame it on the rain.

It is a bitter morning in New York City, somewhere around 1902, and the driver of a streetcar is losing a slow fight with the weather. Sleet keeps glazing the front glass opaque, so every minute or two he has to crack open a pane and lean his whole head out into the wind, or stop the car entirely, climb half out, and wipe the windshield clear with his bare hand before lurching on. He is soaked, he is freezing, and he is half-blind the whole route. In a seat behind him, a visitor from Alabama named Mary Anderson watches this performance with the specific irritation of someone who has just realized that a thing everyone else accepts is, in fact, ridiculous.

Anderson was not an engineer. She was an entrepreneur — a real-estate developer in Birmingham who had also run a cattle ranch and a vineyard out in Fresno, California — and back home she did the thing engineers are supposed to do and ordinary people supposedly can’t: she sketched a fix. A spring-loaded arm carrying a rubber blade, swung across the glass by a lever inside the cab, with a counterweight to hold it flat against the window, and — a nice touch — removable once winter passed. She had a working model built.

On the 10th of November, 1903, the U.S. Patent Office granted Mary Anderson Patent No. 743,801 for a “window cleaning device.” Cruder wipers had been dreamed up before hers; none had worked. Hers did. And then the world, presented with a simple device that would let drivers see in the rain, decided it didn’t want one.

When Anderson tried to license the patent through the Canadian firm of Dinning & Eckenstein in 1905, they declined, sniffing that it lacked “commercial value.” Others raised a more remarkable objection: that a blade moving across the glass would distract the driver. Sit with that. A clean, clear sheet of glass you could actually see through was deemed the dangerous distraction — as opposed to the calm, focused alternative of putting your head out the window into a blizzard, or smearing the windshield by hand at speed. (It is the very same reflex that, decades later, would have people refusing to buy cars because they came fitted with seatbelts — a story I get into in a companion piece, Cars Are Safer Now, But Is Driving? We are remarkably consistent about meeting safety with suspicion.) So her patent simply sat, and expired in 1920 without earning her a dollar. Then, right on cue, the industry helped itself: wipers became common equipment, and by 1922 Cadillac was fitting them as standard, working straight from the principles Anderson had patented two decades earlier. Her name was nowhere on them. Her idea was even popularly credited to a man.

A clean sheet of glass you could see through was branded the dangerous distraction — versus putting your head out into the blizzard.

Anderson’s own family has a blunt theory about why. Sara-Scott Wingo — rector of Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia, and Anderson’s great-great-niece — told NPR she believes the invention went nowhere because Anderson was an independent woman. “She didn’t have a father. She didn’t have a husband. And the world was kind of run by men back then.” Mary Anderson died in 1953, at 87. She was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2011 — 108 years after the patent, and 58 years after she was gone. She is the first instance of the pattern. She would not be the last.

If Anderson were a one-off, she’d be a sad footnote. She isn’t. A few years later the same thing happened again — to a mother and her daughter, in the same industry, with even better inventions.

Charlotte Bridgwood was a Canadian-born vaudeville actress who performed as “Lotta Lawrence,” a serious motorist, and the president of her own firm, the Bridgwood Manufacturing Company. In 1917 she patented the “Electric Storm Windshield Cleaner” — the first automatic wiper, driven by a motor instead of a hand on a lever. Hers used rollers rather than a blade, never quite caught on, and the patent lapsed in 1920. You can already guess what the industry did next, so I won’t make you sit through it a second time.

But here the story turns genuinely strange. Charlotte Bridgwood’s daughter was Florence Lawrence — “The Biograph Girl,” the woman widely called the first movie star, the face of nearly 300 films. And Florence was an inventor too, a more consequential one than her fame suggests: she designed the first “auto-signaling arm” — the direct ancestor of the turn signal — and the first mechanical brake signal. She never patented either. She never earned a penny from either. Improved versions simply appeared on other people’s cars; by 1939 Buick was fitting electric turn signals as standard.

So account for it. Inside one family, the mother handed the world the automatic windshield wiper and the daughter handed it the turn signal and the brake light — three of the most basic safety signals on every car ever built — and between them they kept essentially none of the credit and none of the money. The machine didn’t even have to fight them. It just had to be patient.

Every one of them saw the rain clearly. The world simply refused to see them.

So far the inventors have been the whole story. Now we have to build their antagonist — the machine — and it begins, fittingly, with another rainy night and another person who couldn’t see. On a wet evening in 1916, a Buffalo theatre owner named John R. Oishei was driving down Delaware Avenue when he struck a bicyclist he never saw coming. The cyclist survived. Oishei did not get over it. He became, by his own account, obsessed with the problem of seeing through a windshield in the rain — obsessed enough that at one point he tried solving it by cutting a hole clean through his own windshield to peer through. That did not work, for reasons you can picture.

What worked was a partnership. Oishei found an engineer named John Jepson who had a hand-pulled rubber squeegee, christened it “Rain Rubber,” and in 1917 founded the Tri-Continental Corporation — a name soon mercifully shortened to its telegraph code, Trico. Within a few years Trico wipers were standard on Packard, Pierce-Arrow, Lincoln, and Cadillac, and the company swelled into the largest wiper manufacturer on Earth. (Oishei became one of Buffalo’s great philanthropists; the city’s Oishei Children’s Hospital still wears his name.) The wiper, in other words, was now Big Business — and big business is the machine our inventors keep losing to.

It grew more capable, too. In 1919 William Folberth and his brother Fred patented a wiper run off the engine’s own intake vacuum, so the glass cleared itself with no hand required; Trico promptly bought them out to end the patent fight. Vacuum wipers ruled for decades, despite a flaw written into physics: engine vacuum collapses under hard acceleration. So at the exact moment you floored it to climb a hill or merge into traffic, your wipers would slow to a crawl or stop dead — going blind precisely when you most needed to see. By the late 1950s the industry gave up and switched to the dedicated electric motors that still wipe your glass today.

Which brings us to the man who took the machine to war, and very nearly lost everything winning. Robert Kearns was an engineering professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, and he had a reason to think about eyes: on his wedding night, years earlier, a champagne cork had struck him in the face and left him blind in one eye. He’d spent a long time since considering how an eye actually works — and one rainy night the obvious question arrived. A human eye doesn’t stare; it blinks, clears itself, and pauses. Why couldn’t a wiper? Sweep, pause a beat, sweep again.

In 1963, working with parts off the shelf, he built it: a wiper whose pause was timed by a capacitor charging up and discharging, blinking the blade across the glass at intervals instead of the two dumb settings — on and off — that were the only options the entire industry offered. He patented the design, filing in 1964 and receiving it in 1967. Then he did the thing that doomed him. He showed it to Ford.

They welcomed him in. Ford’s engineers studied his working device closely, talked terms, treated him like a partner — and then, five months later, let him go, explaining that the company had developed an intermittent wiper entirely on its own and no longer required his help. In 1969 Ford launched the industry’s first electronic intermittent wiper on its Mercury line. For years, Kearns made himself believe it had been an honest coincidence.

Then, in 1976, his son brought home a control box from a Mercedes-Benz. Kearns took it apart at his own table and found, staring back at him from inside another company’s car, his own patented circuit. Not an echo of it. It. And not from one company — he would come to believe Ford, Chrysler, General Motors, and Mercedes had all helped themselves. So a single professor declared war on Detroit.

He sued Ford in 1978 and Chrysler in 1982. He was dropped by three separate law firms and ended up arguing the cases himself, in person, for years on end. And he refused every settlement they waved at him — Ford reportedly offered around $30 million — because the money was never the point. He wanted a jury to say it out loud: that they had taken it.

He got that, at a price that’s hard to read about. The Ford case reached trial in 1990; Kearns had asked for $395 million, and the jury, finding that Ford had infringed his patents but not deliberately, awarded him $10.2 million. Chrysler was eventually ordered to pay $18.7 million, a judgment that stood when the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal in 1995. He netted around thirty million dollars in the end — and the decades of war cost him most of the rest of his life, including, by his family’s account, his marriage and a stretch of his sanity. His story became a 1993 New Yorker article and, in 2008, the film Flash of Genius.

In his final years, the man who invented the intermittent wiper drove two old cars — a 1978 Ford pickup and a 1965 Chrysler. Neither one had intermittent wipers.

From there, the device finally earned the recognition its inventors never did — by getting clever enough to see the rain for itself.

In March 1970, Citroën’s wonderfully odd SM offered one of the first tricks: it watched how hard the wiper motor was straining. A high current draw meant the blade was dragging on dry glass, so the car briefly parked the wipers until enough rain had gathered for a clean sweep. In 1983 Nissan tried a piezoelectric sensor that listened for the vibration of raindrops striking the body. And in 1996, General Motors introduced the system most cars still use, marketed as Rainsense.

It’s an elegant piece of physics. A small infrared sensor behind the rearview mirror shines a beam into the windshield at an angle. On dry glass, the light bounces cleanly back to the sensor — total internal reflection. When raindrops sit on the outside, they scatter the beam, less light returns, and the car reads the shortfall to judge the rain and set the speed. (An Australian, Raymond Noack, had patented a combined automatic wiper-lights-washer system back in 1978.) Your car now notices the weather a half-second before you do.

Here is the thing nobody stops to appreciate. We have almost no sense of how crucial wipers are to the plain act of driving, how extravagant their history is, or how much hard engineering and how many vicious lawsuits are folded into them. They get written off as a strip of black rubber that smears the glass — as if a century of research and courtroom warfare weren’t packed inside. It is, I’ll admit, somewhat of a dry topic. Which is a very funny thing to say about a device whose entire job is water.

Take the geometry, which has to bend to the exact shape and rake of every windshield ever drawn. Most cars use simple pivoting blades sweeping in parallel — and leave a dry triangle in front of the passenger. Various Mercedes models and the VW Sharan sweep their blades in opposition instead, toward each other, erasing that corner (and, conveniently, needing no re-engineering for right-hand-drive markets). Buses and trains use big two-armed pantograph blades to cover their tall screens. Mercedes built a single telescoping “Monoblade” that reaches into the corners and pulls back through the middle, tracing an M across the glass. And the steeper and more curved the windshield, the harder a blade has to fight the wind trying to peel it off — which is why the first blade engineered for a curved screen didn’t arrive until 1934. Every blade you’ve ever bought is a quiet compromise between flexibility, pressure, wind, and the precise curve of your particular glass. Black rubber, my foot.

There’s even buried history in the squirt. The washer — that reservoir of water, alcohol, and detergent fired through tiny nozzles, some now using fluidic oscillators to fan the spray — traces to a 1931 idea from an Ohio parts company and a system built by the Uruguayan racing driver Héctor Suppici Sedes in the late 1930s. (Never top it up with engine antifreeze; it strips paint.) Since 2012, Valeo’s AquaBlade has fed the fluid straight out of the blade itself, on cars like various Teslas, the Volvo XC60, and the Citroën C4 Cactus.

The problem looks different on everything that moves, and the answers get wonderful. Cars alone have tried nearly every power source going: electric motors, pneumatic wipers run off the air in a truck’s brakes, the old engine-vacuum motors, even hydraulic wipers sharing the power-steering pump (the 1960s–70s Lincoln Continental and Ford Thunderbird).

And the gloriously thrifty Citroën 2CV drove its wipers purely mechanically, off a cable spun by the gearbox — the same cable that also ran the speedometer — so the wipers sped up and slowed with the car, and at a red light they simply stopped, unless you reached under the dash and worked them by hand with a little crank.

Beyond the car it gets stranger. Trains and buses lean on those big pantograph blades. Ships often skip rubber entirely for a beautiful thing called a clear-view screen — a circular disc set into the windshield that spins at high speed and flings rain and spray off by centrifugal force, giving the helmsman one always-clear porthole in any storm. And fast jets often carry no wipers at all: at hundreds of knots a blade would tear away or drag too much, so they blast the windscreen clear with engine bleed air — hot compressed air tapped straight from the turbines — backed up by water-repellent coatings not far removed from the Rain-X in your garage.

So where does a 120-year-old idea go now? Into its most important job yet, strangely. As cars learn to drive themselves, they see through cameras, radar, and LiDAR mounted around the body — and a self-driving car with a rain-blurred, salt-crusted, bug-spattered sensor is simply a blind one. The humble job of keeping a surface clear is migrating from the windshield in front of you to the sensor suite that now does the looking, with miniature nozzles, air jets, and heaters scrubbing little lenses you’ll never see.

On the glass itself, the whole direction of travel is toward making the blade vanish: better hydrophobic coatings that shed water on their own, fluid delivered from inside the blade, and concepts — including patents filed by Tesla — floating ideas as exotic as ultrasonic fields and lasers to flick droplets off the glass with no moving rubber at all. The wiper may end its life exactly as it began: an obvious problem a few stubborn inventors refused to keep accepting.

Which brings us back to the rain, and to the wrong people getting the credit. The windshield wiper is the purest monument we have to a particular kind of injustice — a thing used constantly and valued never, a century of insight and obsession and courtroom blood, all of it shrugged off as a squeak of rubber on glass. And the credit kept landing on the wrong names, or arriving too late, or never arriving at all: on Mary Anderson, waved off because she was a woman ahead of her time; on Charlotte Bridgwood and her daughter Florence Lawrence, who between them gave us the wiper, the turn signal, and the brake light and kept almost none of it; on Bob Kearns, who clawed his own name back only by spending his health and his marriage to make a jury say it aloud.

Remember what they were all afraid of, at the very start — that a clear windshield would be a dangerous distraction. They had it exactly backwards. The clean glass was never the distraction. The distraction was the spectacle in front of it: the brand, the logo on the box, the famous face miming to someone else’s voice. That’s the trick Milli Vanilli ran, and it’s the same trick Detroit ran, and it works because we’d all rather watch the performance than ask who is actually singing. The wiper is the rare case where, if you look closely enough through the clean glass, you can finally see them standing there — Anderson, Bridgwood, Lawrence, Kearns — the people who did the work.

So the next time it’s absolutely pouring and you flick that little stalk without a thought and the road snaps back into hard, clear focus — give them the credit. And if you’re hunting for something to blame for how long it took the rest of us to look?

Go ahead. Blame it on the rain.