…by an inventor who saw a problem while traveling
I sometimes wonder what inventors were thinking in their initial stages of problem-solving after problem-finding.
Specifically Mary Anderson…whose invention 119 years came in handy on this snowy morning in the northeastern US.
It was Ms. Anderson who took her first trip to New York City in the winter of 1903 and noticed a problem: Neither she nor the trolley car driver could see clearly out of the window. Even the driver had to sporadically stop to wipe off the front of the car. Ms. Anderson, a real estate developer in Alabama, returned to Birmingham and designed a device that could clear the windshield of ice and snow and be operated from inside of the vehicle. Her patent was accepted later that year. Other devices had attempted to solve the same dilemma of electronically wiping off a windshield. Her design, however, was the first that worked (Lemelson-MIT Program, n.d.).
Two parts of this creative invention are striking: Ms. Anderson had no background in design or engineering, and her invention arrived before the onslaught of cars on American roads.
In other words, in her problem-finding process, Ms. Anderson couldn’t have thought, “Wouldn’t a device like this be great for my Model T back in Alabama?” In fact, Ford’s Model T wasn’t manufactured until five years after her innovation.
Finally, as with many other novel ideas, some people initially laughed at the idea of a windshield wiper on a vehicle. After all, they thought that the back-and-forth movement would distract drivers. By 1913, the ridicule about the wiper idea was swept away, as they were standard on cars in the US (Lemelson-MIT Program, n.d.).
Reference:
Lemelson-MIT Program. (n.d.). Mary Anderson: Windshield wipers. https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/mary-anderson