Mary Anderson

Mary Anderson (1866 to 1953) was an American inventor and entrepreneur who conceived the windshield wiper. Born on 19 February 1866, she was touring New York City in a trolley car on a snowy day in the early 1900s when she saw that streetcar drivers often had to open their windows to see in bad weather, sometimes even stopping the streetcar to go outside and clear the window. Her idea was a lever inside the vehicle that controlled a spring-loaded arm with a rubber blade, with a counterweight to keep the wiper in contact with the window, so that the blade could be moved across the windshield to remove rain or snow. Her 1903 patent, U.S. Patent No. 743,801, proved to be the first windshield-clearing device to be effective, and in 1922 Cadillac began installing the wiper as standard equipment. She also built and managed an apartment building in Birmingham, Alabama, and operated a cattle ranch and vineyard in Fresno, California. She was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2011.