Kearns gave wipers a pause knob, showed Ford — then spent decades in court

In 1962 wipers ran at fixed speeds, so in light rain drivers toggled the switch by hand. Robert Kearns, a Wayne State engineering professor whose own eye had been injured by a champagne cork, reasoned a wiper should work like an eyelid — wiping only when needed. His circuit stored charge in a capacitor and triggered a wipe at an adjustable interval, giving drivers a true pause control.

Kearns patented the system (filed 1964, granted as US 3,351,028) and demonstrated a working unit to Ford engineers. No deal followed, but in 1969 Ford began offering electronic intermittent wipers, and the rest of the industry followed. Kearns sued Ford in 1978 and later Chrysler and other makers, acting largely as his own attorney after falling out with counsel.

Ford settled in 1990 for about $10.2 million after twelve years; in 1992 a jury found Chrysler had infringed and awarded damages, later upheld on appeal with total recovery reported around $30 million across defendants. The fight consumed his marriage and much of his life, dramatised in the 2008 film 'Flash of Genius'.

A timer circuit lets the wipe match the rain

The biomimetic 'eyelid' insight turned a binary device into a continuously adjustable one with one timing circuit.

He filed before demonstrating, which made the later infringement cases winnable at all.

He treated litigation as the enforcement phase of the invention, not an optional extra.

The case became a landmark for individual inventors suing carmakers over patent infringement.

A patent protects the mechanism, not the relationship: file before demonstrating to a buyer, and be ready to litigate to the end — enforcement is part of the invention's business model.

Kearns won against Ford and Chrysler and pursued cases against foreign makers until courts cut them off on procedural grounds. He received roughly $30 million in total and spent much of it on legal fees. His patents expired long before the litigation ended; intermittent wipers remain standard on every car. Kearns died in 2005.