DETROIT – There are days every winter when you get in the car and the weather may be raining, snowing, misting, and then doing nothing … all in the course of a minute or two.
That’s when you put your windshield wipers on intermittent and leave them there. I did recently — and remembered, in a flash, the strange, driven little man who invented intermittent wipers.
He won millions from the auto companies for infringing his patents, but walked away from millions more and spent the rest of his life, bitter, miserable and obsessed to the very end.
His name was Robert Kearns, a sometime engineering professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, and his odd, David vs. Goliath struggles were memorialized in the movie, Flash of Genius.
“Remember him?” Avern Cohn, the federal judge who presided over all his cases in the 1990s. “How often does a judge get a case that becomes a New Yorker article, a book, and a movie?”
Not very often, especially in a patent case.
But there aren’t many people like Kearns. “The movie may have shown him as obsessed, but he was much stranger in real life,” said the judge, who seemed to have some sympathy for the inventor.
“I’d call him, quixotic.”
How quixotic? Kearns once refused to pick up a check for $12 million for more than a year, finally came to get his money … and then called a few days later to say he’d lost the check.
When the inventor was attempting to sue General Motors after winning cases against Ford and Chrysler, he decided to fire all his attorneys and represent himself. He had done that for the damages portion of the Chrysler case, at one point sitting in the witness box and reading from an interview by himself of himself.
But when he tried to sue GM, Kearns was missing deadlines to file legal work and plainly had no grasp of what he needed to do.
“I told him that he needed an attorney and asked him, ‘Dr. Kearns, are you going to get a lawyer?’” Judge Cohn said.
“He looked at me and said ‘I’d rather have my arms fall off.’”
Kearns was also a man who, at some point in the 1970s when he found out that Mercedes, too, had infringed his patents, had a nervous breakdown and disappeared. He got on a bus in Washington, convinced that Richard Nixon wanted him to take it to Australia and build an electric car.
He eventually recovered and began suing companies he clearly regarded as having stolen his work. And whatever else you can say about him, he really did invent the intermittent wiper — and convinced juries that the auto companies illegally violated his patents.
All this started, according to a story Kearns sometimes told, when he got the idea for a “blinking” wiper after a champagne cork hit him in the eye on his wedding night.
He spent years obsessively working on an intermittent wiper, until he finally perfected it and was awarded a series of patents. He attempted to market his invention to Ford Motor Co., but after initially showing interest, they sent him away – and soon began selling their own intermittent wipers in the mid-1960s.
He took one of their assemblies apart and realized they had copied his invention. So he sued. He sued Ford and Chrysler and General Motors and Daimler-Benz and Ferrari and others.
But he almost immediately got into trouble when his son, a private detective, seduced a paralegal employee of Daimler’s law firm to get her to steal certain documents. U.S. District Judge Philip Pratt found out about it, and imposed sanctions amounting to $198,310 on Kearns, and held up all the cases until it was paid.
Kearns didn’t have the money. However, Judge Pratt then died, and Judge Cohn, who inherited the cases, ruled that only the one case was “contaminated,” and that the suits against Ford, Chrysler and General Motors could go ahead.
Kearns won $10.2 million from Ford, but didn’t regard that as a victory. He wanted the automaker to pay him $325 million, and he wanted to manufacture the wipers himself and wanted the courts to force the auto companies to buy them from him.
But Judge Cohn ruled that Kearns had not produced any evidence that he had any ability to manufacture windshield wipers, nor any manufacturing and marketing know-how.
Money meant little to him; when the case went to the jury, Ford had offered Kearns $30 million to settle – but he refused.
The inventor did receive $30 million from Chrysler, but that was the end of his success. He could undoubtedly gotten even more from General Motors and other automakers, but the cases were all dismissed after he missed deadlines and failed to follow court rules.
His wife had left him long before because of his all-consuming obsession. He bought a beautiful home but often slept on the floor, plotting to try and get his expired patents back.
Finally, in February 2005, he died at age 78 of a brain tumor and Alzheimer’s disease, muttering about his patents to the end.
“Dr. Kearns made a contribution to the auto industry that was unique, no question,” Judge Cohn said. “But his zeal got ahead of his judgment.” In fact, his obsession had gotten ahead of everything, and destroyed his life. He had, indeed, once had a flash of genius.
But it is hard to think it was even intermittently worth it.
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