Mary Anderson (inventor)

Mary Elizabeth Anderson (1866-1953) was an American inventor and businesswoman credited with patenting the first practical windshield wiper. Born in Greene County, Alabama, she later worked as a real estate developer in Birmingham. During a winter visit to New York City around 1902, she noticed streetcar drivers struggling to see through snow and sleet on the windshield and designed a hand operated device with a rubber blade controlled by a lever from inside the vehicle, letting a driver clear the glass without stopping or leaning outside. She received United States Patent No. 743,801 for the device in November 1903. Automakers initially dismissed it as having no commercial value, and her patent expired in 1920 before she profited from it, but versions of her mechanism became standard equipment on cars by the 1920s. She was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2011.