Picture it: the early 1960s, it's raining lightly outside, and your windshield wipers are refusing to slow down. They continue, unstinting, faster than the drizzle needs. Mild annoyance today; genuinely dangerous distraction back then. One angry Detroit engineering professor went so far as to build a solution in his basement, drive to Ford's headquarters with it, and spend the next three decades in court fighting with the company over it.
According to the Smithsonian Institution's archives , which is the custodian of his personal papers, Robert W. Kearns designed and patented an electronic windshield wiper system with intermittent wiping (pauses in between sweeps) that is found on nearly every car on American roads today. It's a story about what happens when an ordinary person with a good idea runs headfirst into an institution with lawyers on staff. And it has lessons for a younger generation of entrepreneurs learning about the cutthroat realities of the marketplace.
