Mary Anderson Patented the Windshield Wiper. No One Bought It.

In November of 1902, Mary Anderson was riding a streetcar in New York City during a winter storm. The combination of falling sleet and the streetcar's forward motion made the windshield essentially opaque within seconds of the driver wiping it. The driver solved the problem by repeatedly stopping the car, opening the side window, leaning out, and clearing the glass by hand with a rag. He was not enjoying it. Neither were the passengers, who included Anderson.

She was a real-estate developer from Birmingham, Alabama, on a trip north. She returned home, sketched a mechanism, and filed for a patent the following year. US743801 was granted on November 10, 1903. The title is "Window-Cleaning Device." The mechanism: a spring-loaded swinging arm with a rubber blade, mounted outside the windshield, controlled from inside the cab by a small lever the driver could operate without opening anything.

Anderson tried to sell it. Her surviving correspondence with at least one major manufacturer, the Dinning and Eckenstein firm of Canada, includes a 1905 letter explaining that the company had reviewed her design and found it of no commercial value: "we do not consider it to be of such commercial value as would warrant our undertaking its sale."

What didn't happen

Anderson held the patent for its full seventeen-year term. It expired in 1920. Across those seventeen years, no automaker licensed it. Cars in the United States were multiplying rapidly during the period — registered automobiles went from about 8,000 in 1900 to over eight million by 1920 — and yet windshield wipers were not standard equipment on any of them. Drivers continued to lean out windows, or stop, or pull over during weather, or simply not drive in the rain.

In 1922, two years after Anderson's patent expired, Cadillac became the first major American automaker to ship cars with windshield wipers as standard. By the late 1920s, they were on most production vehicles. By 1930, you could not legally sell a passenger car in most US states without them.

Anderson never received any meaningful compensation. She had simply been seventeen years too early.

What it tells us

The case is sometimes told as an example of how patent terms work against early inventors: file too early and your protection expires before the market arrives. That is true. It is also true that the 1905 letter declining her invention reflected something beyond pure economics — the firm's actual stated objection was that the wiper would be distracting to the driver. The same objection had been raised against rear-view mirrors, turn signals, and headlights at various points. None of those objections aged well either.

Anderson lived until 1953. She had time to watch every car in America be built with the device she had described in a 1903 patent, none of them paying her anything. She rarely discussed the patent in her later years; her family said she found the topic annoying.

See the original

The full text and figures of US743801 are on patents.us.