10/08/2021
Mary Elizabeth Anderson was an American real estate developer, rancher & inventor of the windshield wiper blade. On November 10, 1903 Anderson was granted her first patent for a car window cleaning device controlled from inside the car by a hand crank called the windshield wiper.
By the early 1920s, the hand-cranked wiper had been replaced by a system that uses engine vacuum to drive the mechanism. Vacuum wipers were great, except that their speed would vary according to engine load and speed. By the early '60s, vacuum wipers were replaced by an electric drive