Years later, in 1976, while living in Gaithersburg and working as an engineer for the Bureau of Standards, Kearns took apart an electric circuit for an intermittent wiper, and found it was almost identical to the one he had invented. Shortly thereafter, he suffered a nervous breakdown and boarded a bus, convinced he was on a mission for former President Nixon. The police picked him up in Tennessee, and his family sent him to the psychiatric ward at Montgomery General Hospital.
He came out of the hospital a few weeks later, and spent the rest of his life trying to gain credit for his invention. Certainly, the money was important; his dream had always been to start a company that would build the wiper motors and sell them to the car manufacturers. But even more, he wanted the automakers to acknowledge that he had invented the intermittent wiper, and that they had knowingly stolen his idea.
His dad, Tim Kearns says, saw himself as fighting for what was right, as a champion for those whose work, whose ideas, had been claimed by someone else. Many people wrote letters of encouragement, thanking him for taking on the fight. Bob Kearns took those letters, and that mission, seriously.
"It was what he was," Tim Kearns says. "It was what he was determined to do. He looked at it in those terms, that it was something bigger than Bob Kearns."
He eventually was awarded $10 million from Ford and $20 million from Chrysler, with the courts holding that the carmakers had unintentionally violated his patents. They never did acknowledge any wrongdoing, which to Bob Kearns' mind meant the victory was not complete.
Much of the money Kearns received was used to pay his legal bills. But there were other costs as well. He and his wife, Phyllis (played by Lauren Graham in the film), went through a bitter divorce in 1980; 10 years later, he would be sentenced to 120 days in jail, in part for reneging on alimony payments. Even after his legal battles were over, his sense of perspective never quite righted itself; according to his Washington Post obituary, he would often call his children and attorney to discuss ways of reclaiming his patents, which had lapsed years earlier.
In his later years, Bob Kearns spent most of his time in a house on the Wye River - not very far from Oxford, where Tim and Kim had settled in 1998. Given how close they lived to one another, it's no surprise that a lot of Bob rubbed off on Tim, the second of his six children.
