Mary Anderson

Mary Elizabeth Anderson was an American inventor and entrepreneur credited with inventing the first operational windshield wiper. She was born in Greene County, Alabama, and later became known as a real-estate developer in Birmingham as well as the operator of a cattle ranch and vineyard in California. In her 1903 U.S. patent, Anderson described her design as a “window cleaning device for electric cars and other vehicles,” a hand-operated mechanism using a blade to clear snow, ice, or sleet from the windshield. The U.S. Patent Office awarded her Patent No. 743,801 on November 10, 1903 for this device. Anderson’s idea supposedly arose while she was riding a streetcar in New York City on a snowy day and saw the driver repeatedly open the window or stop the car to wipe the glass by hand in order to see. She responded by designing a lever-operated arm with a rubber blade that could be moved across the outside of the windshield from inside the vehicle, keeping the driver protected from the weather.