You’ve heard of the Dodge Brothers, the Chevrolet Twins and of course Henry Ford who gave the world mass assembly in automobiles and the V8 engine.

But on this date in 1903, a woman was given an auto patent for a windshield wiper! All these pioneering men apparently never figured on driving in bad weather but Mary Anderson did. The U.S. Patent office gave her a patent for a “window cleaning device for electric cars and other vehicles to remove snow, ice or sleet from the window”. She created an automatic windshield wiper blade.

It didn’t have ‘delay’ of course, unless you stopped cranking it. That’s right, while you drove in 1903, shifting gears, if it was raining you also had to operate the windshield wiper by means of an internal crank. Still that was an improvement over sticking your arm out into the wind stream to wipe the windshield with your hand.

So the next time you spot a woman driver putting on makeup, texting and driving too slowly in the rain, remember we’d have to stay home on rainy days if it hadn’t been for a woman driver.

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