Alabama
Meet the American who invented windshield wipers, Mary Anderson, Alabama entrepreneur
Mary Anderson cleared glass windshields and broke glass ceilings.
The southern belle, born in Alabama in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, gave the world one of its most widely used safety devices.
Anderson patented windshield wipers.
She was, in many ways, a real-life Scarlett O’Hara of “Gone with the Wind” movie fame.
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Anderson was born to means on a southern plantation but raised in a society devastated by war.
It was also a society that suffered a tragic loss of human capital. Male capital. More than 1 in 5 military-age men (about 22%) in the Confederacy were killed in the Civil War, according to several sources.
American real estate developer, rancher and inventor of the first practical windshield wiper Mary Anderson is shown posing for a portrait circa 1900. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
Southerners responded with indomitable spirit. Anderson was among a new era of entrepreneurs and innovators burning with determination to overcome adversity.
Many of them were women, later represented by the fictional icon O’Hara.
Anderson built apartments in Alabama, herded cattle in California and, following a winter trolley trip in New York City, devised a way to keep the world truckin’ in a tempest.
“She didn’t have a father; she didn’t have a husband, and she didn’t have a son.”
“She didn’t have a father; she didn’t have a husband, and she didn’t have a son,” one of her descendants, Sara-Scott Wingo, said in a 2017 interview with NPR.
“And the world was kind of run by men back then.”
Cattle calls & trolley cars
Mary Elizabeth Anderson was born on Feb. 19, 1866, on Burton Hill Plantation in Greene County, Alabama, to John C. and Rebecca Anderson.
The Civil War had ended only 10 months earlier. The conflict was followed by the economic hardship and social upheaval of the Reconstruction Era across the South.
Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone with the Wind.” O’Hara is the archetype of the southern woman who was determined to help the region emerge from the devastation of the Civil War. (Getty Images)
The Anderson family suffered its own loss in 1870. Mary was just four years old when her father died.
“Mary and her sister, Fannie, and mother continued to live off the proceeds from his estate,” the late Dr. J. Fred Olive III, of the University of Alabama Birmingham, wrote for the Encyclopedia of Alabama.
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The Anderson women moved to Birmingham and entered the real-estate business, building the Fairmont Apartments at the corner of 21st Street and Highland Avenue.
Mary Anderson also sought adventure and/or fortune out west.
In 1893, at age 27, she moved to Fresno, California, where she spent several years managing a vineyard and cattle ranch before returning to Birmingham.
The Anderson women moved to Birmingham, Alabama (shown above) and entered the real-estate business. (Joe Sohm/Visions of America/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
She also visited New York City in late 1902 and experienced northern weather, apparently for the first time.
“While riding an electric streetcar during a snowstorm, she noticed that the motorman operating the streetcar was shivering,” Charles Carey wrote in the 2002 book, “American Inventors, Entrepreneurs and Business Visionaries.”
“She noticed that the motorman operating the streetcar was shivering … He was constantly having to slide open the middle pane so he could wipe off the glass.”
The author also wrote, “Snow was sticking to the windshield, and he was constantly having to slide open the middle pane so he could wipe off the glass.”
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The driver’s vision was impaired, as was his operational ability. The situation created safety hazards for both pedestrians and passengers.
The winter ride exposed to the winter elements was likely miserable for a woman who spent her life in warmth and sunshine surrounded by Alabama bougainvillea and California farmland.
People are shown boarding street cars in winter, New York City, circa 1900. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
“Upon returning to Alabama,” writes Carey, “Anderson gave much thought to the motorman’s plight.”
‘Teased and laughed at’
Anderson spent the next several months devising a way for drivers to clean their windshields while still inside their vehicles.
She appears to have possessed an innate mechanical capability. There is no indication that Anderson ever trained as a mechanic or engineer.
But she emerged with a clever mechanism that displayed many of the hallmarks of windshield wipers today. She applied for the “window cleaning device” patent in June 1903 and received it in Nov. 1903.
Entrepreneur Mary Anderson’s 1903 patent for a “window cleaning device.” We know it today as the windshield wiper. (U.S. Patent and Trademark Office/Public Domain)
Modern windshield wipers operate via powerful little motors that deliver high torque at low speed with the twist of a knob. Drivers, with Anderson’s original device, operated wipers manually with a lever.
“The lever caused a spring-loaded arm with a rubber blade to swing across the windshield and then back again to [its] original position, thus removing droplets of rain or flakes of snow from the windshield’s surface,” noted Lemelson-MIT, a program devoted to innovation, in its online biography of Anderson.
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“It is simply necessary for [the driver] to take hold of the handle and turn it in one direction or the other to clean the pane,” reads the patent application.
“Similar devices had been made earlier,” Lemelson-MIT noted. But Anderson’s “was the first that actually worked.”
Anderson’s wiper worked. But it didn’t sell.
A man operates the windshield wipers on his snow-covered car at night. Circa 1955. (Harold M. Lambert/Lambert/Getty Images)
The inventor “was teased and laughed at by many people because of her idea for the windshield wipers,” said MIT-Lemelson.
Anderson ran into a stonewall of doubt and opposition from the transportation industry and auto titans.
“We regret to state we do not consider it to be of such commercial value as would warrant our undertaking its sale,” said one rejection letter from the Canadian firm of Dinning and Eckenstein.
Anderson “was teased and laughed at by many people because of her idea for the windshield wipers.”
“Through no fault of her own, her invention was simply ahead of its time, and other companies and entrepreneurs were able to profit off her original ideas,” reports the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
A vision with rhythm
Mary Anderson died on June 27, 1953, at her summer home in Monteagle, Tennessee.
She was 87 years old and is interred at Elmwood Cemetery in Birmingham.
Anderson was a “widely known Birmingham resident and owner of the Fairmont Apartments,” said her obituary in the Birmingham Post-Herald.
Mary Anderson of Alabama invented the windshield wiper after a winter trip to New York City, where she watched a trolley-car driver struggle to keep the vehicle’s windshield clean during a snowstorm. (Public Domain)
Her rights to the patent expired in 1920 – just as autos were exploding in popularity and the need to operate them safely in bad weather grew more obvious even to auto titans.
“In 1922, Cadillac began building cars with windshield wipers as a standard feature,” reports the National Inventors Hall of Fame — which inducted Anderson in 2011.
“The rest of the automotive industry followed suit not long after.”
Anderson lived long enough to see the world embrace the vision she had as a young woman in New York City in 1902.
Wiper blades sit on the cockpit windows of an Antonov OKB AN-70 aircraft as it stands on display prior to the opening of the Paris Air Show in Paris, France, 2013. (Balint Porneczi/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Windshield wipers today are found on almost every vehicle in the world — planes, trains and automobiles.
They’re on boats and trolleys too.
“Windshield wipers clapping time/I was holdin’ Bobby’s hand in mine.” — “Me and Bobby McGee”
Windshield wipers are frontline troops in defense of public safety. They give us eyesight any time Mother Nature drops a blindfold of snow, sleet or rain around our vehicles’ window on the world.
Anderson’s invention also keeps the economy, the constant flow of goods and services, running 24/7.
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Transportation would come to an immediate halt any time bad weather hit a city, a highway, a state or an entire region, without windshield wipers.
Anderson’s vision even keeps the beat on memorable moments in our lives and in pop culture.
Windshield wipers, among many other uses, provide a built-in paper-clip for parking tickets. (Lindsey Nicholson/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Songwriter Kris Kristofferson captured the rhythmic reliability of windshield wipers in “Me and Bobby McGee,” his atmospheric American anthem about searching for freedom and love on a rainy night in Louisiana.
Windshield wipers are so essential to modern life we don’t even notice them — unless they’re used as a giant paper-clip for parking tickets.
“Windshield wipers clapping time/I was holdin’ Bobby’s hand in mine/We sang every song that driver knew,” Janis Joplin, and other performers, have sung in popular versions of the tune set to the beat of a windshield wiper metronome.
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Windshield wipers are so essential to modern life we don’t even notice them — unless they’re used as a giant paper-clip for parking tickets. It’s perhaps the only flaw in Mary Anderson’s essential innovation.
“We’re all really proud of her,” Sara-Scott Wingo, one of her few descendants, said in her 2017 NPR interview.
Mary Anderson, shown in center, patented the windshield wiper in 1903. Her innovation has allowed vehicles to move safely in almost any weather condition. (Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/picture alliance; Michael Ochs Archives; Fox Photo, all via Getty Images)
“I have three daughters. We talk about Mary Anderson a lot. And we all sort of feel like we want to be open and receptive to sort of our own Mary Anderson moments.”
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MONTGOMERY, Ala. (WSFA) – Plaintiffs have appealed to the Alabama Supreme Court after a circuit judge last week dismissed their lawsuit against Republican gubernatorial candidate Tommy Tuberville.
The suit argues Tuberville does not meet the Alabama Constitution’s eligibility requirements to serve as governor.
In the appeal filing, plaintiff’s attorney Barry Ragsdale said the issue is “whether the circuit court had subject matter jurisdiction to hear Plaintiffs’ claims.”
It is unclear when the Alabama Supreme Court will rule.
Montgomery County Circuit Judge Brooke Reid ruled July 9 that the court did not have jurisdiction to hear the case.
The plaintiffs, two Alabama voters, claim Tuberville’s primary residence is in Florida and argue he does not meet the constitutional requirement that candidates for governor be Alabama residents for at least seven years before the general election.
On June 29, Tuberville’s legal team and the plaintiffs argued the case in Montgomery County Circuit Court.
Tuberville previously cleared a challenge from fellow Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken McFeeters.
The Alabama GOP Candidate Committee unanimously ruled Tuberville is qualified to run for governor, citing documentation including an Alabama driver’s license, voting record and tax returns.
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In certain outposts throughout the South, it’s pronounced “progrum,” not program.
However you say it, the SEC footprint houses some of the most celebrated and iconic college football programs in all the land, complete with rabid fanbases that breathe college football all year. Games are played in towering cathedrals where the crowds partake in what’s almost a religious experience on fall Saturdays.
When evaluating the SEC’s programs, recent results should be considered, but rankings also should reflect historical success, traditions, blue-blood status and fan support.
Here’s how I rank the SEC’s programs, top to bottom:
Alabama football is more than a program, and it’s bigger than an international brand. It’s a way of life. The Script A represents tradition and excellence. Alabama fans are plugged in year-round to their favorite sport, and expectations rarely dip. Coaches who thrive in T-Town are immortalized in bronze. The GOAT conversation runs through Alabama. Is it Nick Saban or Bear Bryant? Either way, it’s an Alabama coach.
2. Oklahoma
The crimson and cream have blue blood. Among SEC schools, Oklahoma trails only Alabama for all-time winning percentage. Double-digit win seasons remain the standard, although the 2000 Sooners remain OU’s last national champion. Oklahoma ruled the 1950s under Bud Wilkinson, then ran back their dominance with Barry Switzer’s wishbone in the 1970s and 80s. Seven Heisman winners point to the program’s star power.
3. Texas
Texas’ deep war chest suits the NIL era, but don’t mistake the Longhorns for the nouveau riche. They’re a traditional power that emerged from an inexcusable, prolonged slumber in between Mack Brown and Steve Sarkisian. Texas enjoyed its heyday in the Southwest Conference under Darrell Royal, but the Longhorns also showed their horns during the Brown era. They belong among the heavy hitters.
The Bulldogs don’t crack the list of blue bloods, but Kirby Smart made them look like one. Georgia has seized a place of persistent power that was long considered possible, because of the school’s location within fertile recruiting terrain. Smart flawlessly implemented Saban’s recruit-and-develop blueprint. We’re witnessing Georgia’s glory days, decades after Herschel Walker and Vince Dooley supplied the previous peak in the early 1980s.
5. LSU
LSU is the only program to have three coaches win a national championship in this millennium. Lane Kiffin could become the fourth. Money poured in to fund his roster. LSU’s standards are such that Brian Kelly got fired after winning 71% of his games. In-state talent gravitates to LSU, but the Tigers also built a national brand, and a night game at Tiger Stadium is a college football mecca.
6. Tennessee
Few states can match Tennessee’s unrelenting vigor for college football. Gen. Robert Neyland put the Vols on the map and got his name on the stadium. Johnny Majors earned a place of adoration. Phillip Fulmer’s Vols flourished in the 1990s. Since Fulmer, Tennessee’s ravenous fans infrequently had a chance to say, “It feels like ’98.” For too long, it felt more like dysfunction, but Tennessee recaptured respectability under Josh Heupel.
Few individuals mean more to a program than what Steve Spurrier means to Florida. He revolutionized the Gators from an also-ran into one of the premier programs of the 1990s. The Head Ball Coach branded The Swamp and gave the Gators an identity. They became SEC championship game regulars. Urban Meyer injected more glory with two titles. Florida lacks the consistency and history of some higher-ranked programs, but its peaks are just as lofty.
These are dark days for Auburn. The Tigers endured five consecutive losing seasons, their bleakest period since the late 1940s. Auburn’s loyal fan base deserves better. Recent woes aside, this accomplished program achieved undefeated seasons under three coaches since the 1990s. From Pat Sullivan to Bo Jackson to Cam Newton, Auburn produced decorated stars. Now, it just needs to pull out of this funk.
Trivia question: When did Texas A&M last win a national championship? Answer: 1939. The Aggies possess the financial resources, fan support and recruiting location to be top shelf, but greatness stubbornly eludes them. R.C. Slocum’s Aggies ruled the Southwest Conference in the early 1990s. Is it time for a fresh set of glory days? Mike Elko’s early returns suggest it’s safe for the Aggies to dream of ascending to their potential.
10. Mississippi
Those old enough to witness Johnny Vaught remember Ole Miss as a powerhouse. Those who watched Archie Manning remember the Rebels with a superstar. Then, Kiffin and Trinidad Chambliss made it so everyone can remember Ole Miss as a playoff team with a premier quarterback. Kiffin treated the Rebels like they were small by leaving for LSU, but not before spawning an uprising that showed the school’s potential in the NIL era.
Arkansas piled up Southwest Conference hardware under Frank Broyles, along with an undefeated season. The conference crowns ceased after Arkansas left in 1991 for the SEC, where there’s been more famine than feast for the Hogs. Even in the SEC, the Razorbacks enjoyed a few highlight seasons, but those uprisings are fading into the rearview mirror. The Hogs need another Darren McFadden.
The Tigers tout seven seasons of double-digit-wins in the past 20 years. They transitioned to the SEC better than many expected. Gary Pinkel became the best thing to happen to Mizzou since Dan Devine. Eliah Drinkwitz has been a gift, too. Anyone who’s a millennial or older can remember the program’s highlight moments, even if they never resulted in a Big 12 or SEC title.
13. Mississippi State
Dan Mullen and Mike Leach did it well for Mississippi State, but Starkville remains one of the toughest SEC outposts to win big or to sustain success. Jackie Sherrill’s 74 wins are the most for any Mississippi State coach. He needed 13 seasons to reach that number. You can’t take the cowbells away from Mississippi State, nor its 15-12 record in bowl games.
14. South Carolina
Spurrier’s successful 11-year run at South Carolina ranks among the best program-building feats in modern history. He won 11 games three seasons in a row, and his teams finished ranked in the top 10 each year. The Gamecocks never won 11 games before Spurrier, and they’ve never hit double digits since he left. Aside from Spurrier’s tenure, the peaks are few and far between.
A program that employed Bear Bryant (and finished 11-1 under the Bear in 1950) can’t rank last on this list, so here we arrive at Kentucky. What can we say about the Wildcats? Well, they own a winning record against Vanderbilt, and they occasionally aren’t as bad as you’d expect a basketball school to be. Mark Stoops got them to a respectable level, but was unable to keep things afloat.
16. Vanderbilt
Vanderbilt’s 10 wins last year register as its single-season record, so you could say the program’s never looked better. The less said, the better, about much of Vanderbilt’s history — unless you want to discuss the 1904 season. That year, Vanderbilt went 9-0 and outscored its competition 474-4. Glory days.
Blake Toppmeyer is the USA TODAY Network’s senior national college football columnist. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on X @btoppmeyer.
ENTERPRISE, Ala. (WBMA) — The Enterprise Police Department announced Monday that a 40-day search of the Coffee County Landfill for the remains of 2-year-old Genesis Reid has concluded without locating her remains.
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During a news conference on July 13, the Enterprise Police Department said the search operation, which began May 7, involved federal, state, county and municipal law enforcement agencies, forensic experts, volunteers and support personnel from across Alabama.
According to police, investigators developed evidence that led them to believe Genesis’ mother, Adrienne Reid, murdered Genesis on Christmas night 2025, removed her from an apartment and later disposed of her body. Police said Reid reported Genesis missing 53 days after her death, which investigators said affected the timeline of the investigation.
Authorities said the landfill search was based on evidence that led investigators to believe Genesis had been placed in a dumpster at the apartment complex. The search continued for 40 working days and included approximately 10 million pounds of landfill material, according to police.
Investigators said teams examined more than 20,000 non-human bones and inspected numerous bags and other materials during the operation. Officials said the search area was reviewed and cleared by experts before landfill operations concluded on July 10.
Police said the search did not locate Genesis’ remains but emphasized that the operation was conducted thoroughly based on the evidence available at the time.
“The landfill search answered one important question,” police said during the news conference. “It strongly indicates that Genesis was not located in the specific area of interest that would have been believed to be associated with landfill operations.”
The department said the investigation will continue, with the focus now shifting toward court proceedings and efforts to seek justice for Genesis.
Police also expressed appreciation to the agencies, volunteers, local organizations and community members who assisted with the search effort.
“Although our search has concluded, our commitment to Genesis has not,” police said. “We will continue to pursue justice, we will continue to seek the truth, and we will never forget this precious child.”
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