Screenhead

Given that Ford is now pretty much the only major automotive manufacturer left on the face of the earth, it’s not surprising to see that movies are made about their earlier days.  Flash of Genius is one such movie, a dramatic pseudo-documentary about the earliest days of the intermittent windshield wiper and their original inventor, Dr. Robert Kearns.

In Flash of Genius, Dr. Kearns and his family create the Kearns Corporation, a firm designed to develop and eventually produce the Blinking Eye Wiper, a windshield wiper designed to move at various speeds to improve reaction to falling rain.  It could adjust its speed according to the rate at which the rain fell, and it’s essentially the same as the design is today.  But back then, when Kearns first developed the wiper, Ford was amazed to see it.  So amazed, in fact, they made a push to keep it for their own.  Thus began a long and arduous legal battle for Robert Kearns and his family, filled with hardship and peril and loss and everything else, but hopefully reaching the climax they all long for.

This is, when you get right down to it, the story of just one man–more specifically, just one family–against one of the largest corporations the world has ever known.  It could never be regarded as simple, nor could it ever be called easy.  But what it could be called is an amazing movie.

Not only an amazing movie, but an amazing journey down the road of one man’s life with a corporate carjacker in the passenger’s seat.  Interestingly, this movie was released only about four years after the death of the actual Robert Kearns, and if it hadn’t been for that, you might well have never had the chance to see this incredible story of one man’s struggle against corporate hubris so massive it earnestly believed it could steal the very ideas from a man and use them for its own purposes.  It’s shameful.  And yet, at the same time, it’s hopeful.

Robert Kearns, you see, fought back.  Robert Kearns took on a company with only one thing in mind–not the money.  Not the public accolades.  But rather, the sheer RIGHT of the matter.  He would not back down until it was acknowledged, publicly, that HE was the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper, despite the fact that he had to destroy his job and his family and his sanity to do it.

He did not. Back. DOWN.

Okay, granted, by most reasonable standards this is insanity, but still.  He was right.  Why shouldn’t he fight?  This story should give us all hope.  It’s a uniquely American–a uniquely Michigan, even–story.  We’re looking to corporations to stand up and reduce carbon emissions and go green, we’re looking at our governments to police the corporations.  Why aren’t we looking to guys like Kearns and his ilk, guys in their basements, gals in their garages, families in their spare rooms?  Corporations are great in their way, sure.  They give economies of scale and access to bigger markets.  But they’re just a means to an end.  They’re not city-states.  They’re not powers and forces.  They’re just TOOLS.  Like the windshield wiper.

In a time when everyone the world over is losing their jobs, and when the little guy seems at his most powerless, it’s good to look at stories like Kearns’ and remember that sometimes the little guy can win one.

And so can we.

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