Meet the Newcastle fan who invented the windscreen wiper

Working that day was Newcastle’s official photographer Gladstone Adams (above) who motored to the match in his Darracq car. It was open-topped and similar to the 1904 Darracq which stars in the film Genevieve.

A 1904 Darracq motor car that starred in the movie Genevieve, makes its way through the London traffic in 1999 during the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run. Gladstone Adams had a similar vehicle, only with a windscreen

In 1908, the 300-mile journey from Newcastle to London was so unusual that Gladstone’s Darracq was parked in the window of a shop in Oxford Street in London so that crowds could marvel at its mechanics while he went to the match.

As he approached the ground, Gladstone, 28, was probably very optimistic. Newcastle had won the First Division title the previous season and this was their third FA Cup final in four years, having lost to Aston Villa in 1905 and Everton in 1906. This time, they were playing a Second Division side, Wolverhampton Wanderers, and so were favourites.

But, as ever, the Magpies underachieved. They lost 3-1 and as Gladstone retrieved his Darracq from the shop window he may have thought that life can’t get much worse than this.

Oh, but it could.

Somewhere on the Great North Road back to Geordieland, it began to snow. The big, wet April flakes kept piling up on his windshield so that he had to stop and clear them away by hand. When he tired of that, he folded his screen in half so he could see over the top – but that, of course, left him open to the elements of the A1.

If only, if only, he must have thought, there was some mechanical device that would wipe the snow away.

And as there wasn’t one, he invented one.

With a block of wood, a piece of wire and a length of rubber, he built a prototype, and in April 1911 he filed a patent for his “moving squeegee” with Liverpool agents Sloan & Lloyd Barnes. It was a horizontal bar with a rubber strip that was held against the windscreen and ran up and down it, operated either by hand or foot by the driver, or powered by the engine, as required.

So the disappointed Newcastle fan had invented the windscreen wiper.

Members of staff clean Gladstone Adams'  windscreen wiper at the Discovery museum in Newcastle, on April 24, 2008

But he never pursued it. There weren’t enough cars on the roads to make a wiper device commercially viable.

Now, there are lots of other contenders for the title of inventor of the windscreen wiper. In 1896, George J Capewell of Connecticut took out a patent for windscreen clearer; the Polish concert pianist Jozef Hofmann also claimed to be the father of the wiper. In 1903, Mary Anderson of Alabama patented what is believed to be the first viable wiper, operated by a lever from inside a trolley bus driver’s cab, and in the same year Irishman James Apjohn patented a device in Britain that would move vertically up and down the screen clearing it.

And on March 24, 1908 – a month before the FA Cup final – Prince Henry of Prussia, the brother of Kaiser Wilhelm and grandson of Queen Victoria, patented a side-mounted device that cleared the screen.

But none of them found a market, and their ideas were left to lie.

Until a rainstorm in 1916 in Buffalo in New York, when restaurateur John R Oishei hit a cyclist whom he hadn’t seen. The cyclist was unharmed, but Oishei determined not to let it happen again. He did a quick google search and somehow discovered some of the other patents. He took the best bits of them and in 1917 started the Trip-Continental Company to produce the “rain rubber” – a hand pulled rubber squeegee.

Oishei was in the right rainstorm at the right time. Immediately after the First World War, there was an “automotive boom”, and three luxury vehicle manufacturers, Packard, Lincoln and Cadillac, started installing his wipers with Cadillac the first to make them standard in 1922.

But if anyone had listened to the Magpie fan, wipers would have been clearing the windscreens of the world a whole decade earlier.

Manfred von Richthofen aka The Red Baron

By this time, Gladstone Adams had had an exciting First World War: he’d joined the Royal Flying Corps as a reconnaissance photographer, risen to be a captain and was one of the first on the scene at the Somme when the Red Baron – Baron Manfred von Richthofen – was shot down. He took photos of the air ace’s body, which were used for propaganda purposes, and then played a part in organising the funeral.

PA File Photo of the military funeral of Baron Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen,the 'Red Baron', shot down on April, 21, 1918. His funeral the following day was arranged by Gladstone Adams

In peacetime, his photography business in Whitley Bay expanded so he employed 90 people. He was a local councillor for 25 years and he could also claim to have invented the sliding rowing seat and the trafficator – the little lights that dropped down on the side of a car when it was turning which were the precursor of the indicator.

He died in 1966 having given his prototype windscreen wiper to the Discovery Museum in Newcastle where it is on display. His entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes him as “motorist and inventor of the windscreen wiper”, and on a plaque near his birthplace in City Road, Newcastle, he is described as having “invented the car windscreen wiper in 1911”.

The former Ouseburn Mission building in City Road, Newcastle, which has a plaque on it in memory of the windscreen wiper inventor Gladstone Adams - his birthplace in 1880 in St Ann's Row was nearby. 

It's a shame that history has given him the brush off.