Mary Anderson

Mary Elizabeth Anderson (February 19, 1866 – June 27, 1953) was an American inventor and entrepreneur credited with inventing the first operational windshield wiper. She was born in Greene County, Alabama, and later became known as a real-estate developer in Birmingham as well as the operator of a cattle ranch and vineyard in California. In her 1903 U.S. patent, Anderson described her design as a “window cleaning device for electric cars and other vehicles,” a hand-operated mechanism using a blade to clear snow, ice, or sleet from the windshield. The U.S. Patent Office awarded her Patent No. 743,801 on November 10, 1903 for this device. Anderson’s idea supposedly arose while she was riding a streetcar in New York City on a snowy day and saw the driver repeatedly open the window or stop the car to wipe the glass by hand in order to see. She responded by designing a lever-operated arm with a rubber blade that could be moved across the outside of the windshield from inside the vehicle, keeping the driver protected from the weather.

Although Anderson attempted to sell or license the patent, including an approach to a Canadian manufacturing firm, potential buyers rejected the device as lacking commercial value at a time when automobiles were still relatively rare. Her 17-year patent expired in 1920 without having been put into mass production. By the early 1920s, however, mechanical windshield wipers had become standard equipment on many passenger cars, and by 1922 Cadillac was installing wipers as standard features, using designs that followed the basic principles of Anderson’s device. Her mechanism is now widely recognized as the first effective windshield-clearing device and a blueprint for modern wiper systems, even though this impact only became clear in retrospect. In 2011, decades after her death, Anderson was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for her pioneering contribution to transportation safety.