From the archives of Bob Montgomery, motoring historian
WINDSCREEN WIPERS: The trend towards fully enclosed passenger compartments on most cars in the mid to late 1920s give rise to a generally unforeseen problem - how to adequately provide a clean windscreen for the driver.
Previously, with open-topped cars, this had been easily dealt with by the use of a cloth rag from the driver's seat. Now, a much greater emphasis was placed on the role of the windscreen in ensuring that the driver had a good view of any approaching hazards.
The problem had existed to a some extent since the 1910s and some manufacturers had sought to deal with it by fitting a horizontally-split windscreen on which the upper half pivoted at the top, allowing the driver to flip it up in bad weather so that he could see straight out.
This must have been a chilly way to deal with the problem but was probably preferable to trying to work one of the many devices sold as accessories to do the job now done by windscreen wipers.
While few, if any, of these devices worked, the split windscreen had one great advantage, it allowed unrivalled visibility in fog, a feature which saw opening windscreens remain on many cars until just after the second World War.
The first device which we would recognise as a forerunner of the modern windscreen wiper was invented by Prince Henry of Prussia and was fitted to a Benz car in which he left Hamburg to drive to England in 1911. It has been suggested, however, that this idea was originally developed in 1907 by Paul Ravigneaux, editor of La Vie Automobile and chief engineer at De Dion-Bouton, who published a similar idea in his magazine. The wiper in question was a rubber wiper operated by hand.
By the following year, a "wiper" was being manufactured and was advertised in various catalogues. This was the "Gabriel", which was operated by pulling a cord and sold for 15 shillings.
Soon afterwards (1916), an automatic wiper appeared in the US and was fitted to that year's Willys Knight cars. However, It took another six years before automatic wipers appeared in Britain and Ireland, when W M Folberth introduced a wiper powered by a double-acting air engine connected to the car's engine.
And therein lay a major problem with all these wiper systems. Various methods were tried to power these wipers but none were entirely successful. One method was to drive the wiper by a cable from the gearbox, but of course, as soon as the car came to a halt in town traffic, the wiper no longer functioned.
Another type of drive was the suction-type, which was connected by a rubber tube to the inlet manifold. This design was one of the more successful but it too had it's limitations, most notably that when the driver accelerated to overtake another car, the inlet manifold depression was reduced and the wiper would slow down or stop, blurring the screen at a critical moment!
It was not until the electric wiper arrived - having been invented by a Hawaiian dentist in 1917 - that a usable, reliable, multi-speed wiper became available to motorists in the USA and Europe. The first such wipers began to be fitted in 1923 - called the Berkshire and produced in the US by Trico in 1923, it was introduced to the UK by the Houdaille Hydraulic Suspension Company - but they remained relatively rare and only on more expensive models for most of the next decade. When introduced into Britain they were priced at almost £3 and were so slow to catch on so that it was the end of the 1920s before electric wipers became generally available on most cars available on the Irish market.