On a winter trip to New York at the start of the 1900s, Mary Anderson, from Birmingham, Alabama, watched a streetcar driver keep opening his window to clear the snow off the glass by hand. She went home and designed a lever inside the car that swung a rubber blade across the outside of the windshield, and in November 1903 she was granted a patent for it. Nobody bought it. Cars were still rare and slow, and the companies she approached saw no market. A patent in those years lasted seventeen years, so hers ran out in 1920, and within a couple of years carmakers began fitting wipers as standard. She was early by about the length of a patent, which is the one length of time that decides whether being right pays.