A Snowy Streetcar Ride Gave Every Car a Wiper: The True Story of Mary Anderson

Tales of Life: Ordinary People, Extraordinary True Stories · Oct 15, 2026 · 5m

The true story of Mary Anderson, the woman from Alabama who invented the windshield wiper. On a snowy winter visit to New York in the early 1900s, she watched a streetcar driver open his window again and again to clear the glass by hand. She designed a rubber blade on an arm outside the glass, moved by a lever from inside, and received a patent in November 1903. A company wrote that it had no commercial value, and her patent ran out in 1920, before the idea took off. Two years later Cadillac made wipers standard. In 2011 she joined the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

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