Mary Anderson ripped out the glass windshield and shattered the glass ceiling.
Born in Alabama just after the Civil War, this Southern belle introduced one of the most widely used safety devices in the world.
Anderson patented the windshield wiper.
She was, in many ways, the real-life Scarlett O’Hara, made famous by the film Gone with the Wind.
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Anderson was born into a wealthy family on a Southern plantation but grew up in a society devastated by war.
It was also a society that suffered a tragic loss of human capital, male capital: by some sources, more than one in five Confederate men of military age (about 22 percent) died in the Civil War.
Mary Anderson, American real estate developer, rancher, and inventor of the first practical windshield wiper, is shown posing for a portrait circa 1900. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
Southerners responded with resilience, and Anderson was part of a new generation of entrepreneurs and innovators determined to overcome adversity.
Many of them were women, later represented by the fictional icon O’Hara.
Anderson built apartments in Alabama, ran cattle in California, and took a winter trolley trip in New York City before figuring out how to keep trucks moving around the world, even through storms.
“She had no father, no husband, no son.”
“She had no father, no husband, no son,” one of her descendants, Sarah Scott Wingo, told NPR in a 2017 interview.
“And the world was kind of run by men back then.”
Herd of cows and a trolley car
Mary Elizabeth Anderson was born on February 19, 1866, on Barton Hill Farm in Greene County, Alabama, the daughter of John C. and Rebecca Anderson.
The Civil War had ended just 10 months earlier, and was followed by the economic hardship and social unrest of the Reconstruction period across the South.
Vivien Leigh played Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, the quintessential Southern woman determined to help her community recover from the devastation of the Civil War. (Getty Images)
The Anderson family also experienced loss in 1870. Mary was only four years old when her father died.
“Mary, her sister Fanny, and their mother continued to live off the income from his inheritance,” the late Dr. J. Fred Olive III of the University of Alabama at Birmingham wrote in the Encyclopedia of Alabama.
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The Andersons moved to Birmingham and went into real estate, building the Fairmont Apartments on the corner of 21st Street and Highland Avenue.
Mary Anderson also sought adventure and fortune in the West.
In 1893, at the age of 27, she moved to Fresno, California, where she operated a vineyard and ranch for several years before returning to Birmingham.
The Andersons moved to Birmingham, Alabama (pictured above) and went into the real estate business. (Joe Soam/Visions of America/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
She also visited New York City in late 1902, apparently experiencing northern weather for the first time.
“While riding a streetcar during a snowstorm, she noticed that the driver operating the train was shivering,” Charles Carey wrote in his 2002 book, American Inventor, Entrepreneur, and Business Visionary.
“She noticed that the driver driving the tram was shaking and had to constantly slide open the middle pane to wipe it.”
The author also writes, “The windshield was covered in snow and I constantly had to slide open the center pane to clear it.”
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The driver’s eyesight was impaired and his driving ability was impaired, creating a safety hazard for both pedestrians and passengers.
For a woman who had spent her life in the warmth and sunshine of Alabama’s bougainvilleas and California’s farmlands, a winter drive exposed to winter elements would likely have been miserable.
The film shows people riding a streetcar in winter in New York City circa 1900. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
“Back in Alabama, Anderson reflected deeply on the plight of drivers,” Carey wrote.
“They made fun of me and laughed at me.”
Anderson spent the next few months coming up with a way to allow drivers to clean their windshields without ever leaving their cars.
Although she appears to have had a natural talent for machines, there is no evidence that Anderson was trained as a mechanic or engineer.
However, she devised an ingenious mechanism that has many of the characteristics of today’s windshield wipers. She applied for a patent for her “Window Cleaning Apparatus” in June 1903, and was granted it in November 1903.
Entrepreneur Mary Anderson received a patent in 1903 for a “Window Cleaning Device,” known today as a windshield wiper. (U.S. Patent and Trademark Office/Public Domain)
Modern wipers are powered by powerful small motors that provide high torque at low speeds with the twist of a knob. On Anderson’s original device, the driver operated the wipers manually with a lever.
“The lever swings a spring-loaded arm with a rubber blade over the windshield and then [its] “It returns to its original position and removes raindrops and snowflakes from the surface of the windshield,” Lemelson-MIT, a program dedicated to innovation, said in Anderson’s online biography.
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“It’s simply [the driver] “Grab the handle and turn it in either direction to clean the window,” the patent application states.
“Similar devices have been built before,” Lemelson noted at MIT, but Anderson’s was “the first to actually function.”
Anderson’s wipers worked, but they didn’t sell.
A man operates the windshield wipers on a snow-covered car at night, circa 1955. (Harold M. Lambert/Lambert/Getty Images)
“The idea of the windshield wiper caused the inventor to be mocked and laughed at by many people,” MIT’s Lemelson said.
Anderson faced a wall of skepticism and opposition from the transportation industry and major automakers.
“Unfortunately, we do not believe the property has sufficient commercial value to warrant us undertaking the sale,” the refusal notice from Canadian firm Dinning & Eckenstein Ltd said.
“I got a lot of teasing and ridicule from people because of the wiper idea,” Anderson said.
“Through no fault of her own, her inventions were simply ahead of their time, allowing other businesses and entrepreneurs to profit from her ingenious ideas,” reports the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Rhythmic vision
Mary Anderson died on June 27, 1953 at her summer home in Monteagle, Tennessee.
She was 87 years old and is buried in Elmwood Cemetery in Birmingham.
According to his obituary in the Birmingham Post-Herald, Anderson was “a well-known Birmingham resident and owner of the Fairmont Apartments.”
Mary Anderson of Alabama invented the windshield wiper after a winter trip to New York City and seeing streetcar drivers struggling to keep their vehicle’s windshields clear during a snowstorm. (Public Domain)
Her patent expired in 1920, at a time when automobiles were exploding in popularity and the need for cars to operate safely in inclement weather was becoming clear to even the giants of the automotive industry.
“In 1922, Cadillac began building cars with windshield wipers as standard equipment,” reports the National Inventors Hall of Fame, which inducted Anderson in 2011.
“Soon after, the rest of the auto industry followed suit.”
Anderson lived long enough to see the vision she had as a young woman in New York City in 1902 embraced by the world.
A wiper blade is attached to the cockpit window of an Antonov OKB AN-70 aircraft on display before the opening of the 2013 Paris Air Show in Paris, France. (Balint Porneczi/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Today, almost every vehicle in the world is equipped with windshield wipers, including planes, trains, and automobiles.
It is also available on boats and trolleys.
“When the windshield wipers started clapping/I was holding Bobby’s hand.” – “Me and Bobby McGee”
Windshield wipers are the front line of public safety: They allow us to see when Mother Nature blankets the world with snow, sleet, and rain around our car windows.
Anderson’s inventions also help keep the economy running – a constant flow of goods and services 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
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Without windshield wipers, transportation would come to an immediate halt when severe weather hit an entire city, highway, state, or region.
Anderson’s vision also touches on some of our lives and some of the most memorable moments in pop culture.
Windshield wipers have many uses, including a built-in paper clip for holding parking tickets. (Lindsay Nicholson/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Lyricist Kris Kristofferson captured the rhythmic reliability of windshield wipers in “Me and Bobby McGee,” an atmospheric American anthem about searching for freedom and love on a rainy Louisiana night.
Windshield wipers are such an essential part of modern life that we don’t even notice them exist, unless they’re being used as giant paperclips to hold parking tickets.
“The windshield wipers were beating/I was holding Bobby’s hand/Sang every song the driver knew.” Janis Joplin and other performers have sung popular versions of this song to the metronome beat of windshield wipers.
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Windshield wipers are such an essential part of modern life that we barely notice them, unless they’re being used as giant parking ticket clips. This is perhaps the only drawback to Mary Anderson’s important innovation.
“We’re all really proud of her,” Sarah Scott Wingo, one of her few remaining descendants, told NPR in a 2017 interview.
Mary Anderson, pictured center, patented the windshield wiper in 1903. Her invention made it possible for automobiles to travel safely in almost any weather condition. (Karl Josef Hildenbrand/Picture Alliance, Michael Ochs Archive, Fox Photos, all via Getty Images)
“I have three daughters. We talk about Mary Anderson a lot. And we all feel like we want to be open and receptive to our own Mary Anderson moments.”
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