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Early vehicles had no mechanical method for clearing their windscreen, which resulted in drivers manually removing visual obstacles by hand while driving. Mary Anderson saw the need to remedy this while her driver leaned out of his window while driving to clear snow from his windscreen while driving in New York City.
Anderson’s solution was a rubber blade attached to a spring-loaded arm that would move back and forth across the glass to wipe away the weather. Secured on the outside and operated from the inside, a counterweight was used to ensure contact between the wiper (which swung from a downward position) and the window. Mary patented the design in 1903 but it wasn’t an instant hit with car companies, who thought it would distract drivers. She never profited from her invention, even when wipers became a standard on cars. She did, however, get a name check in an episode of The Simpsons in 2006.
Bertha Benz is the original road-tripper. Early one August morning in 1888 she set off in her husband’s car, without permission, spare fuel or a map, to make the 106km (66-mile) journey from Mannheim to Pforzheim in Germany. Her husband was Karl Benz, and the car was the world’s first.
Powered by an internal combustion engine with an output of barely one horsepower, hills could be problematic for Karl’s three-wheeled Benz Patent-Motorwagen. It could also topple easily, but these design flaws did nothing to deter Bertha, who believed it was ready for the open road, and that the world was ready to see a woman setting its new course. Her pioneering drive wasn’t without incident, but Benz’s stoicism and ability to adapt and improvise makes her even more impressive. When the Patent-Motorwagen’s engine overheated, she used water from ditches and streams to cool it, and when a fuel line became blocked, she cleaned it with her hat pin. She even used her garter as insulation material and paid a cobbler to cover the brake shoes in leather – and in doing so invented the world’s first brake lining.
It was inevitable that she’d run out of fuel, but she found a pharmacy in Wiesloch, which is now considered the first petrol station in history, and purchased ligroin (a petroleum based solvent). Benz arrived at her destination 12 hours after departing, and sent Karl a telegram to let him know that she’d successfully completed the first long-distance journey in his motor car. In his autobiography Karl Benz wrote: “In those days when our little boat of life threatened to capsize, only one person stood steadfastly by me; my wife. She bravely set new sails of hope”. Bertha died in 1944, aged 95.
