The epic, decades-long battle between Ford and a small-time inventor
50 years ago, Ford stole a patented design for a new type of windshield wiper. But they picked the wrong inventor the screw with.
BY ZACHARY CROCKETT
On a rainy day in 1962, Robert Kearns had one of those meandering thoughts that separate great inventors from mere mortals:
What if a windshield wiper paused between each wipe, like a blinking eye?
He constructed prototypes in his basement, filed a patent, and began to dream up a plan: He’d set up a pretty little factory in Detroit, become a major supplier of windshield wipers, and go down in history as one of the automobile industry’s great innovators.
Then, Ford stole his idea.
For nearly 30 years, Kearns waged an impossible legal battle against one of America’s most powerful companies. In the end, he won millions of dollars — but it cost him his sanity, his marriage, and the remaining years of his life.
Kearns’ story is remembered as one of history’s great David vs. Goliath lawsuits. But it’s also a reminder of the shortcomings of the US patent system for independent inventors.
An inventor is born
Born in 1927, Kearns spent his youth in Detroit, Michigan, ground zero for the flourishing American automobile industry.
As a kid, he toured Ford Motor Company’s
River Rouge Complex (then the largest integrated factory in the world) and marveled at the auto giant’s innovations. “The automotive — that’s all there was,” he later
told the
New Yorker’s John Seabrook. “If you were an inventor, and you really wanted to reach people, you invented for the automotive.”
vacuum-powered system that ran continuously and didn’t allow for any variance in frequency.
For Kearns, this didn’t suffice — and driving in the rain one day, he figured that a windshield wiper ought to function as a human eye, allowing the driver to control the pauses between, and speed of, the swipes.
At the time, the auto industry made the bulk of its profits by selling add-ons and upgrades; something like a technologically-advanced windshield wiper meant big bucks.
intermittent wiper prototype.
He housed the device in a red box marked “DO NOT OPEN” and installed it in his Ford Galaxie. And in early 1963, he drove to the Ford factory to make his sales pitch.
A fateful meeting with Ford
Through a mutual connection, Kearns was able to set up a 45-minute meeting with Ford’s engineering team. His plan was simple: He’d blow them away with his intermittent wiper, sign a deal to license his technology, open a wiper factory of his own, and become the automobile industry’s go-to supplier.
On the big day, Kearns was greeted by 10 engineers in the parking lot, who peppered him with questions about his invention. They expressed interest but told him the wipers had to run for 3m cycles to meet their standards.
So, Kearns bought an aquarium, filled it with a mixture of oil and sawdust, installed a pair of his wipers inside, and let them run for 6 months straight. Upon passing the test, Kearns filed the
first patent for his intermittent wipers and returned to Ford.
The inventor made a series of presentations to Ford’s engineers and executives — and this time they offered him a contract. But it came with one condition: Ford claimed that, because wipers were a “
safety item,” all of Kearns’ engineering had to be disclosed before the contract was signed.
mental breakdown and had to spend two weeks in a psychiatric ward. His hair, once red, turned snow white.
patent was invalid on the grounds that it wasn’t “sufficiently inventive.”
In 1978, Kearns filed a patent infringement suit against Ford, seeking $350m — $50 for every intermittent-wiper-equipped car Ford sold.
Ford then pulled the big corporation card: It stalled, hoping Kearns
would “lose heart or run out of money.”
Kearns v. Goliath
In the corporate world, there is a concept called “
efficient infringement.”
Big companies like Ford have found that it’s cheaper to steal a patented product and face any legal repercussions later than is it to license it. Most small-time inventors simply can’t afford to spend millions of dollars dragging a case through district courts.
“Multinational companies know that screwing over suppliers is easy money,” says Mike Collins, an author who has studied manufacturing for 30 years. “You see it time and time again.”
But as Ford would soon find out, Kearns wasn’t going to give up.
The sexagenarian inventor hired (and fired) 5 different legal firms, and eventually decided to defend himself. He slept on the floor of his office, surrounded by boxes of evidence. He recruited his children to pour over documents. And he became so unilaterally obsessed with the case that his wife filed for divorce.
Detroit Free Press. “If I walk out of there with nothing more than a check then I’m nothing more than an employee of Ford.”
In January of 1990 — 12 years after the filing — the case finally went to trial. And when it did, Kearns vanished. “I had to go,” he later told
People. “If I had stayed, it would have legitimized what was happening.” He was deep in the Maryland woods, cooking knockwurst over a portable stove when a verdict was finally reached.
Despite selling 20.6m cars (worth $575m in profit) equipped with intermittent wipers, Ford was to pay Kearns a settlement of
$10.2m.
Kearns was not pleased.
“My intent was to have a small shop in Detroit, have nice shrubbery around the plant, hire people — that’s been my dream all my life,” he
said. “When they offer you a settlement, they’re really sending you to a park bench.”
The aftermath
Though Robert Kearns was a newly-minted millionaire, he continued to live an ascetic life, sleeping on the floor of an unfurnished apartment stocked with documents, notes, and witness statements.
The following year, he was back in court filing a similar patent infringement suit against Chrysler.
$18.7m. Kearns called the sum a “booby prize” (a prize typically given to a last-place finisher as a joke) and left the money uncollected for years in protest.
He filed suit against 18 other automakers, but they were
dismissed for various reasons. (In one instance his son, Dennis, was found to have wrongly obtained documents by sparking a romantic affair with a paralegal at the firm representing Porsche).
Eventually, Kearns bought himself an estate in Maryland
and “entered an uneasy retirement.” But even in his waning years, he still couldn’t let the patent cases go.
By the time he died in 2005, the intermittent windshield wiper was an industry standard, built into millions of automobiles around the world.
Today, he is regarded by many inventors as a personal hero for waging a war against the corporate world’s “steal now, pay later” ethos — even though he fell short of his ultimate dream.
“Kearns gained some vindication in the form of $30m in settlements from Ford and Chrysler,” read his
Washington Post obituary. “But he never got what he had sought from the beginning:” control over his own invention.
