Flash of Genius

How can you protect something that is the natural evolution of technology

This is the story of the inventor of the intermittent windscreen wiper.

It is also a classic case study in the dangers of not having in place the appropriate processes to protect, defend and exploit intellectual property to the inventor's commercial advantage.

This is Robert Kearn's journey.

***

Mary Anderson, of Birmingham, Alabama, is usually credited with inventing the windshield wiper.

In 1903, during a visit to New York City, she took a streetcar during a snowstorm and saw the driver repeatedly stop his car to go outside and clean its front glass.

Anderson went home and designed a wiper mounted on a spindle that ran through a hole in the windshield frame and connected to a handle inside the vehicle. A counterweight and spring mechanism kept the rubber blade pressed against the glass.

Over the next 60 years, these and other advances made driving in the rain much safer, but a problem remained: The wipers kept going monotonously back and forth without any pause.

You could vary the speed, but even so, there was always a wiper in your field of vision, and the blades often scraped across a windshield that was nearly dry. The resultant friction made an annoying sound and tore up the blades’ edges.

***

In November, 1962, Bob Kearns was driving his Ford Galaxie through the streets of Detroit when it started to rain lightly.

Kearns turned the wipers on low. In those days, even the most advanced wipers had just two settings, one for steady rain and one for heavy rain; in a mizzling rain, they screeched back and forth across the glass, mesmerizing the driver, and occasionally causing accidents.

Kearns' vision was already impaired as a result of an accident nine years earlier, when, on his wedding night, he was hit in the left eye by a flying champagne cork.

Now, straining to see through the windshield, half thinking about his lousy wipers and half thinking about his bad eye, Kearns had what the Wall Street Journal later called "the kind of inspiration that separates inventors from ordinary people."

He thought, Why can't a wiper work more like an eyelid? Why can't it blink? The idea for the intermittent windshield wiper entered his mind.

In 1963 he built an intermittent wiper system using off-the-shelf electronic components and offered it to Ford.

The interval between wipes was determined by the rate of current flow into a capacitor. When the charge in the capacitor reached a certain voltage, the capacitor discharged, activating the wiper motor for one cycle.

After extensive testing, Ford executives decided to offer Kearns’s intermittent wipers as an option on the company’s Mercury line beginning with the 1969 models.

Kearns assigned his patent rights to the Tann Corporation, a Detroit tool-and-die company, which planned to sell the wipers to Ford and other carmakers. Tann paid Kearns $1,000 a month to continue improving his design.

Kearns had refused to tell Ford how his system worked; the prototype was sealed in a red box labeled do not open. Then one executive told him that since windshield wipers are a safety feature, he was legally required to explain their functioning. Kearns did so.

A few months later he was told that Ford had changed its mind and chosen a different electronic intermittent-wiper system that it had developed in-house. Kearns wanted Tann to sue, but the company depended on Ford for a big chunk of its business, so it was not about to make waves.

Kearns moved on, taking a job with the National Bureau of Standards and moving his family to Maryland.

Then, in 1976, he took apart a wiper control that one of his sons had bought.

He found that it was basically the same system he had invented.

Kearns promptly had a nervous breakdown, fled his home, and spent several weeks in a psychiatric ward. When he emerged, his hair had turned white.

He sued Ford for patent infringement in 1978, later suing Chrysler as well and making plans to sue General Motors and foreign manufacturers.

It took 12 years for the Ford suit to reach trial, as Kearns spurned repeated offers to settle. His wife left him in 1980, and a bitter divorce suit ensued; he spent five weeks in jail in 1990 for nonpayment of alimony.

Ford’s legal team argued that Kearns’s patents were overly broad and therefore invalid.

As Ted Daykin, a former Ford engineer, told The New Yorker in a 1993 article, “An electronic timing device was an obvious thing to try next. How can you patent something that is in the natural evolution of technology?”

The intermittent wiper, according to Daykin, was really the work of dozens of anonymous engineers at Ford, Trico, and other firms.

In the end, Kearns achieved the vindication he craved—and wrecked his life.

He won $10.2 million from Ford in 1990 and $18.7 million from Chrysler in 1995, though both juries determined that the companies had not intentionally infringed on his patents.

Near the end of the Chrysler litigation, he fired his fifth law firm and decided to represent himself.

The work overwhelmed him, and when he began missing deadlines, the remaining suits were dismissed.

He retired, but his patent rights remained an obsession until Alzheimer’s disease overtook him.

In 2005 Robert Kearns died in a Maryland nursing home.

In his final years, he drove around in two aging vehicles: a 1978 Ford pickup and a 1965 Chrysler.

Neither had intermittent wipers.

Kearn's story has been made into a Hollywood movie - Flash of Genius to be released in October 2008