I have to put my head out the window to see where I'm going

Snow on the glass again. I've been leaning out the side for six blocks and I can't feel my ears. — Streetcar driver, 1905

In the winter of 1902, Mary Anderson, a real estate developer from Birmingham, Alabama, watched a New York streetcar driver keep stopping to wipe off his front glass by hand. She patented a blade on a swinging arm that you worked from inside. A Canadian company told her it had no commercial value. Her patent ran out in 1920, right about when carmakers started making wipers standard. Somebody made money on it. Just not her.

Still bugs us: the blade that smears instead of clearing. Most need replacing once or twice a year.

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Her wiper was made to come off. The patent says you could take it down when you didn't need it, so it wouldn't spoil the look of the car in fair weather. A weight held the rubber blade against the glass.

She got her credit late. Her 1903 patent is called the first windshield cleaner that worked, and she went into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2011, 58 years after she died.

She wasn't the last to get shorted on wipers. Robert Kearns patented the wiper that pauses between swipes in 1967 and took the carmakers to court. Ford paid him about $10.2 million, and Chrysler was ordered to pay $18.7 million plus interest, upheld in 1995. Wipers have been hard on inventors.