110 years ago: Prince Heinrich of Prussia’s windscreen wiper patent
If it didn’t exist, you’d have to invent it: the windscreen wiper. Back when cars still had to manage without wiper blades, frustrated drivers worldwide racked their brains to find a solution to the problem of rain and dirt obstructing their view. Consequently, many people can claim to have invented the windscreen wiper. The first patent in Germany was granted on 24 March 1908 to Prince Heinrich of Prussia, brother of the last German Emperor.
Necessity is the mother of invention – and it doesn’t just spark flashes of inspiration in those whose profession is to research progress. Amateurs, too, set their sights on the problems and pitfalls of everyday life and successfully resolve them. Hardly any innovation illustrates this better than the windscreen wiper, for its inventors include, amongst others, an American farmer, an English press photographer, a Hawaiian dentist and a Canadian actress.
Not to be forgotten is a member of the German aristocracy: Prince Heinrich of Prussia (1862–1929) was the one who, on 24 March 1908, was granted the first German patent for the windscreen wiper (DRP 204343). The brother of the German Emperor Wilhelm II and grandson of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom was a passionate motorist. Through the ‘Prince Heinrich Races’ he sponsored – long-distance endurance races covering a distance of around 2,000 kilometres, which were held in 1908, 1909 and 1910 – he rendered outstanding services to motor racing. Prior to this, in 1905, he had been involved in the transformation of the German Automobile Club into the Imperial Automobile Club (K. A. C.). In the same year, he also came up with the brilliant idea for a ‘windscreen wiper for the front windscreen’, consisting of ‘a wiper blade projecting in the manner of a cantilever’, as stated in the patent specification.
Specifically, Heinrich’s invention consisted, as described in ‘ ’, ‘in a windscreen wiper being fitted to the laterally free-standing windscreen, which can be moved up and down by the driver at any time and directly, i.e. without any special mechanisms, up and down, thereby enabling the dust and dirt accumulating on the outside and, where applicable, the inside of the windscreen, as well as any raindrops, snowflakes and the like, to be wiped off or removed” . With his invention, the prince wished, in his own words, to remedy a “nuisance” that had long troubled him, namely that the “framed glass pane” fitted in front of the “driver’s seat”, whilst protecting the driver from dust and road grime whilst driving, “very quickly becomes opaque” due to deposits. The same applied with regard to precipitation: ‘If one drives [...] at night on streets lit by lamps, or during the day in relatively good lighting conditions, or even in sunlight, then every raindrop acts as a converging lens through which the light is refracted, completely blinding the driver’s eyes, for the many raindrops then appear [...] as twinkling stars and make a clear view almost impossible. This [...] impairment of the driver’s clear view jeopardises the safety of the motor vehicle’s handling and, consequently, the lives of all the vehicle’s occupants as well as those of people passing by on the roads.”
Heinrich’s windscreen wiper, designed to remedy this problem, was not yet a resounding success due to its manual operation. The development from the initially manually operated wiper blades to today’s electronically driven ones with sensors was to span the entire 20th century and required the collaboration of engineers and proven technical experts.
Just as Prince Heinrich’s patent was not the final word in the history of the windscreen wiper, neither was it the first: An early precursor was a ‘Window-Clearing Apparatus’ designed for locomotives, devised by David G. Richards of Cleveland, Ohio, and patented in the USA on 14 August 1888 (No. 387,919). Whilst Prince Heinrich’s ‘wiper blade’ was made of ‘flexible material’, Richards used a rubber strip to clean the windscreen – a material which, as is well known, became the standard for wiper blades. Due to its tear resistance and elasticity, even at low temperatures, natural rubber was initially used in the early decades. However, its rapid ageing and the resulting need for frequent replacement were a disadvantage, which is why the natural material was replaced by synthetic chloroprene rubber, which was more wear-resistant and more resistant to, amongst other things, ozone, UV radiation and chemicals.
But back to the origins: following on from Richards in the lineage of inventors is Jacob Kirchmer Jr. (1876–1925) from Cincinnati, Ohio, whose ‘Window Cleaner’ was patented in the USA on 5 July 1898 (No. 606,995). Kirchmer’s windscreen wiper was intended for use on railways and ships, as was the ‘Locomotive-Cab-Window-Cleaner’ developed by Robert A. Douglass from Truro, Canada, which was granted US patent No. 762,889 on 21 June 1904.
Other inventors had already made the transition to the motor car: in Great Britain, the engineer James Henry Apjohn (1845–1914), a native of Ireland, introduced a manually operated, brush-fitted, vertically movable wiper arm. On 9 October 1903, he was granted British patent No. 190321790 for an ‘Apparatus for Cleaning Carriage, Motor Car and other Windows’. Just one month later, on 10 November 1903, the time had come in the USA as well: Mary Anderson (1866–1953), a farmer from Birmingham, Alabama, had developed a device that some historians regard as ‘the world’s first functioning windscreen wiper system’. It consisted of a lever fitted near the steering wheel which, when required, set in motion a spring-loaded swing arm with a rubber blade on the windscreen; the arm would then return to its original position. Incidentally, the system could be removed so that, in fine weather, it would not be an eyesore or spoil the view of the countryside … US Patent 743,801 granted Anderson intellectual property rights for her ‘Window-Cleaning Device’ until 1920. In 1905, she offered her patent to the Montreal-based company Dinning & Eckenstein, which, however, declined as it saw no commercial benefit in it: ‘(W)e do not consider it to be of such commercial value as would warrant our undertaking its sale.’ In fact, many motor cars had no windscreens at all due to their lack of speed. In the USA, it was not until 1916 that windscreen wipers began to be fitted as standard equipment. The big business only really took off after Anderson’s patent had expired.
Another British patent dates from April 1911. The patent holder was the press photographer Gladstone Adams (1880–1966) from Newcastle upon Tyne. Three years earlier, following the FA Cup final in London – which his club, Newcastle United, had lost – Adams had been driving home from the capital when he got caught in a snowstorm and had to stop repeatedly to clear the snow from his windscreen by hand to ensure a clear view. Adams’ inspiration to invent a windscreen wiper literally fell from the sky along with the snow. However, nothing more than a prototype – made of wood, wire and rubber – ever came of it; it can still be viewed today at the ‘Discovery Museum’ in Newcastle.
The year 1917 marked a milestone in the further development of the windscreen wiper. Ormond Edgar Wall (1876–1937), a dental surgeon from Honolulu, Hawaii, launched the first electric windscreen wiper (US Patent 1,227,100 dated 22 May 1917). This was mounted centrally in the middle of the windscreen and, driven by an electric motor, traced a sort of semicircle across it. The Canadian actress Charlotte A. Bridgewood (1861–1929), mother of the silent film star Florence Lawrence, also attempted to automate or motorise the windscreen wiper. Her efforts were successful, as her ‘Cleaning Device’ went down in history on 6 August 1918 as US Patent 1,274,983. In the mid-1920s, the Stuttgart-based company Robert Bosch then unveiled a design in which an electric motor, at the touch of a button, drove two wiper arms simultaneously and moved them evenly across the windscreen (German Patent No. 472574 of 14 February 1929).
By this point at the latest, Prince Heinrich’s great innovation had been superseded, but he had long since shifted his ambitions from cars to aeroplanes and was the proud holder of a pilot’s licence. On 20 April 1929, the heavy smoker died of throat cancer, a fate he shared with his father, the 99-day Emperor Frederick III (1831–1888). He lives on in the public consciousness – not as the German inventor of the windscreen wiper, but as the creator of the ‘Prinz-Heinrich’ cap, the emblem of the Imperial Yacht Club in Kiel. Prince Heinrich was, in fact, at home not only on land and in the air, but also at sea – as Grand Admiral of the German Navy and Vice-Admiral of the British Fleet.
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Editorial office: Guido Deußing, Neuss
Dr Markus Weber / Guido Deußing