In the winter of 1902, a woman from Alabama named Mary Anderson was traveling to New York City and was shocked by how slow the bad weather made traffic. Snow and cold rain had blurred the two windscreens of the trolley, forcing drivers to open the panes of their cars and per  through the gap between them. Anderson sketched a solution in her notebook: a rubber wiper blade on the outside of the windshield, connected to a lever in the car.

The idea predates Henry Ford's car industry.

Anderson filed a patent for her invention the following year, but few people owned their cars, so her invention did not attract much interest. Cars in those days were convertible, and windshields were an optional accessory. "The reaction to rain on the windscreen" explained Leslie Kendall, a curator at the Petersen Automotive Museum. By the time Henry Ford's Model T made the automobile mainstream a decade later, Anderson's "window cleaner" had been forgotten.

One rainy night in 1916, John Oishei was driving the National Roadster when he hit a cyclist. (The cyclist was unhurt.)"harrowing experience." he later said. "It made me feel the need to have a clear vision when driving in the rain."

At the time, John Oishei and others had come up with windshield cleaners similar to Mr. Anderson's design, but none caught on. Oishei found a locally made, and Rain Rubber was born! Then he set up a company to market it and it quickly became standard equipment in American cars. And his company soon dominated the windshield wiper blades market.

Over the years, the wipers have been modified repeatedly to meet market demands.But the basic concept remains the same as Anderson's.