QUEENSTOWN -- Five years ago, Robert W. Kearns walked away from $30 million offered by Ford. Last week, he simply shrugged when he won $21 million from Chrysler.
What Mr. Kearns wishes he had is the time he's lost.
For 32 years, Mr. Kearns has relentlessly pursued automakers worldwide to get proper credit for inventing the intermittent windshield wiper. In the process, he saw his marriage collapse, suffered a nervous breakdown and consumed every waking moment steeped in lawsuits.
Some -- even his daughter -- have questioned his sanity. Few understand why nothing will placate his outrage at automakers that bypassed him -- an unknown inventor -- and used his design on their cars.
"It's got nothing to do with money," he says.
Mr. Kearns was born 68 years ago in the shadow of a Catholic church and, beyond, a Ford manufacturing plant, the lifeblood of his hometown, River Rouge, Mich., near Detroit.
Today, he feuds with God and automakers in the solitude of his farmhouse on the Wye River on the Eastern Shore.
"Thou shalt not steal. You said that," he implores his maker. "How come I have to carry the burden?"
Mr. Kearns believed in God, country and the Big Three when he invented the pausing wipers, now standard equipment on virtually every automobile on the planet.
But his greatest achievement would ultimately be the source of his greatest suffering.
"I don't think anybody -- nobody -- understands the pain," he says, choking back tears. "What did I do wrong?"
Celebrating wedding
On a balmy August evening in 1953, intermittent wipers didn't even exist. Mr. Kearns was celebrating his wedding, ensconced in an Ontario chateau, when a champagne bottle changed history.
The cork blasted him in his left eye. His wife, Phyllis, rushed out of their private bathroom in a lace slip to find her pajama-clad husband covered in blood.
Mr. Kearns, then a neophyte engineer, lost most of his sight in his left eye. But the accident lifted a veil. It made him think about his loss: the mechanics of the eye, the opening and closing of the lid, the hesitation in the motion, the meaning of the design. "God doesn't have eyelids move continuously. They blink."
He set out to make wipers that blink, too.
