THEY TRIED TO WIPE HER OUT OF HISTORY

Don’t let the rain blur the vision you’re chasing. 

Anyone who rides German trains nowadays knows what it’s like to deal with unexpected stops and delays. But imagine how much worse it would be if just a bit of steady rain or snow meant a train had to make unscheduled stops every few minutes. 
 
That’s exactly how it worked at the turn of the 20th century. It wasn’t because the trains didn’t work when they got wet, though. Their drivers simply couldn’t see anything.  
 
The reason? No one had invented the windshield wiper yet

Enter Mary Anderson

Mary Anderson was one of the millions of people getting by in a wiperless world. But on a trip to New York City in 1903, she had an inspired idea. 
 
While taking a trolley through the city during a winter storm, the driver kept having to stop, get out, and wipe the windshield clean with his hands before getting back in and continuing to drive. Seeing this happen again and again, Anderson had a thought: Could you make a device that cleared water, snow, and ice from a driver’s view without them needing to stop or get out? 
 
Against expectations for women in 1903, Anderson decided to see if she could invent the gadget herself.  

A woman before her time 

This wasn’t out of character for Anderson. She had helped her mother and sister build and run an apartment building in her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, and later moved to Fresno, California, to do the tough work of managing a cattle ranch and vineyard before heading back to Birmingham to help care for a sick aunt.  
 
A woman being the head of money-making enterprises was strange enough for the time, but Anderson’s work in fields like real estate development and ranching were particularly rare.

She broke norms once again when, in June 1903, she applied to patent what she called a „window cleaning device“ that, as she wrote in her application, could be operated „from the inside of the car-vestibule.“ The window cleaner was also removable so that drivers could take it off when the weather was nice if they wanted their car to have its „usual appearance.“ 
 
On November 10, 1903, the U.S. patent office granted Anderson a 17-year patent on the invention. 

Fortune and fame? Not really 

Given that today essentially every vehicle with a windshield uses wipers, you might imagine that everyone immediately recognized the value of Anderson’s creation. You’d be wrong. 
 
She wrote to many different companies asking if they’d be interested in buying her patent, and all of them turned her down. One of Anderson’s descendants told the U.S. news organization National Public Radio that she still has a letter one business sent Anderson that says of the invention, „We regret to state we do not consider it to be of such commercial value as would warrant our undertaking its sale.“  

It’s likely some of this rejection had to do with Anderson’s status as a single woman. The male-dominated business world simply couldn’t imagine that a woman could come up with a clever, profitable invention – especially for something so masculine as an automobile. 
 
In the end, Anderson never made a dime from her patent. But, tellingly, in 1922 – just two years after Anderson’s patent expired in 1920 – Cadillac became the first car company to make windshield wipers standard on all their models, starting a trend that every car-maker would follow. 
 
Clearly, Anderson had envisioned something groundbreaking and extremely valuable. Somewhat ironically, it took decades for the world to clear its view enough to see it.