Up until 1903, no one imagined that rain on a moving vehicle’s windshield could be avoided. It was something drivers just accepted and dealt with on their own, generally by manually trying to remove the windshield moisture that was impairing their vision while driving. All of that changed when a young woman called Mary Anderson invented the windshield wiper, an idea that struck her as she drove from Alabama to New York City.
Except for the tragedy that inspired her notorious invention, not much is known about Mary Anderson. She was born in Greene County, Alabama, in 1866. In 1889, together with her widowed mother and sister, she relocated to Birmingham, Alabama, where she became a real estate entrepreneur shortly thereafter, constructing the Fairmont Apartments. In the winter of 1903, she traveled by trolley car to New York. Anderson struggled to view the attractions throughout her vacation due to the bad weather. Her driver, too, had difficulty seeing well. To see, her driver drove with both windows open and used his hands to wipe the snow and ice off the windshields. Anderson determined that this procedure needs to be improved. As a result, she designed a gadget that could be operated from within the vehicle to clean the windscreen.
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Anderson applied for and was granted a patent for a swinging arm with a rubber blade in 1903. The device was a lever that the driver could use from inside the car. The lever caused a spring-loaded arm with a rubber blade to swing across the windshield and then return to its original position, clearing rains or snowflakes from its surface. Similar devices had been designed before Anderson’s, but hers was the first to function. Furthermore, the device could be easily removed after the winter season was through.
Automobiles were not particularly popular at the time she submitted for her patent. Henry Ford had not yet produced his Model A car, and he would not begin mass production of his legendary Model T automobile until 1908. Meanwhile, Anderson was taunted and laughed at by a large number of people for her proposal for the windshield wipers. Many believed that drivers would be distracted by the movement of the windshield wipers. However, the laughing was brief. By 1913, many Americans owned automobiles, and mechanical windshield wipers were ubiquitous. It’s hard to envision what drivers would do without windshield wipers a century later.
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