Squeegees, Windshield Wipers & Patent Wars

Squeegees, Windshield Wipers & Patent Wars

Who Made That Windshield Wiper? In the winter of 1902, an Alabama woman named Mary Anderson visited New York and was appalled by how the weather slowed down streetcars. Snow and sleet obscured the trolleys’ two-paneled windshields, forcing drivers to open both panes and peer through the gap between them. In her notebook, Anderson sketched out a solution: a squeegee wiper on the outside of the windshield, connected to a lever on the inside.

Anderson's invention came about during a trip to New York City when the Alabama-born inventor noticed that streetcar drivers had to open the windows of their cars when it rained in order to see. As a solution, Anderson invented a swinging arm device with a rubber blade that was operated by the driver from within the vehicle using a lever.

Many people were initially leery of Anderson's windshield wiper invention, thinking it would distract drivers, but by 1916 windshield wipers were standard on most vehicles. It was also a woman inventor who first patented the automatic windshield wiper in 1917 (Charlotte Bridgwood's "Storm Windshield Cleaner").

Anderson patented her invention the following year, but so few people owned automobiles that it attracted little interest. Motorcars were open-air in those days, and windshields were an optional accessory. “The reaction to rain on the windscreen was just to take off the windscreen,” explains Leslie Kendall, curator at the Petersen Automotive Museum. By the time Henry Ford’s Model T took motoring into the mainstream a decade later, Anderson’s “window cleaning device” had been forgotten.

Unto the breach stepped John Oishei, an aspiring playwright who operated a vaudeville theater in Buffalo. While driving his National Roadster on a rainy night in 1916, Oishei hit a cyclist, a “harrowing experience,” he later said, “that imprinted on my mind the definite need for maintaining vision while driving in the rain.” (The cyclist was uninjured.)

By then, others had come up with windshield-clearing devices similar to Anderson’s, but none were in wide distribution. Oishei found a locally made, hand-operated wiper called the Rain Rubber, which slid along the gap between the upper and lower panels of the split windscreens that were then in use. He then founded a company to market it. The device required a certain amount of dexterity — drivers had to operate it with one hand while shifting and steering with the other — but it quickly became standard equipment on American motorcars.

Oishei’s company, which was eventually called Trico, soon dominated the windshield-wiper market. While not an inventor himself, Oishei was relentless in his pursuit of patents, purchasing whatever technology he couldn’t develop in-house or litigate out of existence. After William M. Folberth patented a vacuum-powered windshield wiper that ran on suction from the engine’s intake manifold, for example, Trico spent three years battling him in court before buying his company in 1925 for $1 million. A later patent war, between Trico and rival windshield-wiper company Anco, stretched from the mid-1940s until 1971, making it one of the longest-running lawsuits of its day.

Over time, windshield wipers have been re-engineered again and again, in response both to changing windshield designs and to automakers’ desire for enticing new add-ons. But the basic concept remains true to what Anderson sketched aboard that New York trolley in 1902: a squeegee that wipes water from the glass. As one early windshield-wiper advertisement explained: “A Clear Sight Ahead Prevents Accidents. An Undimmed Vision Makes It Easier to Drive.”

Before Ettore, workers used the Chicago squeegee, which had two pieces of rubber and 12 screws. It was heavy and difficult to change the rubber. Steccone's squeegee was lightweight, with one piece of rubber and two clips. It was easier to use, but people were reluctant to switch. "At first, he gave them away to window cleaners," said Steccone's daughter, Diane Smahlik, Ettore's chairwoman. "They would give him a hard time. They said it was a toy."

Squeegee: A squeegee, squilgee or sometimes squimjim, is a tool with a flat, smooth rubber blade, used to remove or control the flow of liquid on a flat surface. It is used for cleaning and in printing. The original squilgee was a long-handled, wooden-bladed tool fishermen used to scrape fish blood and scales from their boat deck, and to push water off the deck after it had been washed.

The best-known of these tools is probably the hand-held window squeegee, used to remove the cleaning fluid or water from a glass surface. A soapy solution acts as a lubricant and breaks up the dirt, then the squeegee is used to draw the now water-borne dirt off the glass leaving a perfectly clean surface. Some squeegees are backed with a sponge which can soak up soapy water from a bucket for application to a dirty window.

With the development of the skyscraper in the 20th century, a more efficient tool for the cleaning of window exteriors was needed. Professional window washers began using the Chicago squeegee, a bulky tool with two heavy pink rubber blades. Changing the blades required the loosening of twelve separate screws. The modern single-blade window cleaning squeegee was patented by Ettore Steccone in 1936; it was made of lightweight brass with a very flexible and sharp rubber blade. The Ettore Products Co. is still a leader in the squeegee market today.