In 1967, Robert Kearns patented a windshield wiper that paused between sweeps; Ford later used the idea, and a jury awarded him $10.2 million in 1990

Picture it: the early 1960s, it's raining lightly outside, and your windshield wipers are refusing to slow down. They continue, unstinting, faster than the drizzle needs. Mild annoyance today; genuinely dangerous distraction back then. One angry Detroit engineering professor went so far as to build a solution in his basement, drive to Ford's headquarters with it, and spend the next three decades in court fighting with the company over it.

According to the Smithsonian Institution's archives, which is the custodian of his personal papers, Robert W. Kearns designed and patented an electronic windshield wiper system with intermittent wiping (pauses in between sweeps) that is found on nearly every car on American roads today. It's a story about what happens when an ordinary person with a good idea runs headfirst into an institution with lawyers on staff. And it has lessons for a younger generation of entrepreneurs learning about the cutthroat realities of the marketplace.

A professor with a very particular annoyance


Kearns taught engineering at Wayne State University, and by all accounts had been legally blind in one eye since a freak accident on his wedding night years prior. This old injury seems to have sensitized him to the strain that he felt when seeing wipers moving unceasingly across glass. He devised a system that mimicked the human eye, which blinks every few seconds instead of staying perpetually open. He attached simple off-the-shelf electronic components like transistors, capacitors, and resistors to create a working model of his idea and mounted it onto his Ford Galaxie.

Kearns didn't pitch his idea to just anyone. He went directly to Ford. The automaker's engineers were so taken with the idea that they discussed pricing with him. Several years later, however, Ford unveiled its own intermittent wiper on the cars it manufactured, with no input from Kearns at all. He discerned the similarities to his patented design almost immediately. The ensuing legal fight would see the better part of a decade pass before any resolution was reached.

When "off-the-shelf parts" became the whole argument

Kearns filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against Ford in 1978. The automaker's main argument in its favor of not violating Kearns' patent was almost disarmingly simple: nothing in the wiper was a novel component. Transistors, capacitors, resistors- these were all common, readily available electronics components. How could something constructed of parts that most people could buy at an electronics store possibly be an original invention?

Kearns' argument in response, which many people in the patent law world consider to be the correct one, was that a combination of preexisting components could be considered an invention if it wasn't obvious exactly how to do so. Known in the industry as the "non-obviousness" standard, this argument formed the basis of the long-drawn-out court case. According to the official opinion in the matter, published by the nonprofit legal archive CourtListener, the litigation continued for years, debating damages, licensing norms, and ways to calculate what Kearns was owed as compensation for Ford's unauthorized use of his patent on millions of vehicles.

The verdict, and the price of winning

In 1990, a jury in a federal court ruled in favor of Kearns, awarding him $5.1 million in damages. Facing a likely appeal, Ford agreed to pay him $10.2 million, doubling the jury's figure to put the case to an end. Kearns was also able to secure a separate infringement lawsuit victory over Chrysler. According to The Hustle's account of the saga, Ford had sold over 20 million cars equipped with intermittent wipers by the time it settled, deriving hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from a feature it never licensed. The victory came at a steep personal cost to Kearns; the case bled him dry both monetarily and in terms of his marriage, and he was driven to self-represent in many of the court proceedings after draining several law firms of their resources.

Why should this matter

For a generation raised on stories of startups, side businesses, and allegations of intellectual property theft from bigger firms, Kearns' story has broader appeal. It's less about the wipers and more about what protecting an original idea truly costs when you are up against an institution with deeper pockets, and what it means when the system, however slowly and painfully, ultimately lets the little guy win. His invention found its way into mainstream use in 1969; his decade-and-a-half-long legal battle to prove it as his own idea was finally concluded in 1990. Every time your windshield wipers pause mid-drizzle, they owe their existence to Kearns' legal battle over his patent, a battle that lasted more than a decade.