Bob Kearns eventually was proven right. He won more than $30 million from Ford and Chrysler - although it was at the cost of his marriage and, at times, his own sanity.
Today, sitting in the 120-year-old home he shares with his wife of 11 years, Kim, and their 8-year-old daughter, Claire, Tim Kearns can laugh at some of his father's more outrageous antics, like flying off to Ireland to avoid a process server or simply disappearing for weeks at a time, going on what his family called "walkabouts." But he can also smile at some of the hard-earned lessons his father taught him, like the importance of doing the right thing and not accepting a lie as the truth. And he can tear up a little when asked to sum up his dad's legacy.
"I think he was a great father," Tim Kearns says after a moment's pause. "He instilled in me values. He stood by those values, and he made his family uphold those same values. But isn't that what you're supposed to do?"
Bob Kearns was an engineer by training who, during World War II, served in the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner to the CIA. He was, according to his son, a man of incessant curiosity and strong convictions, who never quite got over the wariness that his OSS training instilled in him. All of which, Tim Kearns says, explains why his father was an inventor who demanded his due, and was convinced others were trying to keep it from him.
"He was somewhat zealous, a little deranged, yet an incredibly focused public person," the younger Kearns says. Adds his wife, Kim, with her husband's nodding assent, "He was a force to be reckoned with. If you got in his way ... I was scared of him. He was just a little guy."
"That was the OSS man in him," Tim Kearns adds, and they both laugh.
The Kearns family was living in Detroit when Bob came up with the concept of the intermittent wiper. The idea, he often said, came in a moment's inspiration - a "flash of genius," if you will - when he asked himself why a wiper couldn't work in the same way an eyelid blinks, moving at intervals instead of constantly.
As recounted in the film, Kearns, working in the early-1960s, spent months trying to solve the problem. The car companies had been doing similar studies for years, but couldn't come up with a model that worked in extremes of both heat and cold. Kearns' model did, and when he took it to Ford, officials there seemed impressed and ready to talk business. But later, Kearns was told they were no longer interested, that the company was going with a wiper model that had been developed in house.
