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00:00A woman named Mary Anderson was sitting on a freezing trolley car in the middle of a New
00:04York City blizzard. As the snow piled up, she watched the driver struggle. Every few minutes,
00:09he had to stop the car, lean out the window, and manually wipe the ice and slush off the glass
00:14just so he could see the road. The passengers were shivering as the cold wind whipped through
00:19the open window, and the children were crying from the chill. Mary didn't just see a delay,
00:24she saw a danger. She looked at her shivering children and realized that the world was missing
00:28something essential for safety. When she got back home to Alabama, Mary didn't wait for an engineer
00:33to solve the problem. She sat down at her kitchen table and began to sketch. She designed a swinging
00:38arm with a rubber blade that could be operated from inside the vehicle using a lever. It was simple,
00:44it was brilliant, and it was the world's first windshield wiper. But when Mary took her invention
00:49to the big manufacturing firms, they laughed at her. They told her that a moving object on the
00:54glass would distract the driver and cause more accidents. One company even wrote her a letter
00:59saying, We do not consider it to be of such commercial value as would warrant our undertaking
01:04at sale. They saw a distracted woman. Mary saw the future of safety. She didn't let their
01:09condescension shake her confidence. She patented her design in 1903, long before the automotive boom
01:15truly began. Even though she never made a fortune from her invention during her lifetime,
01:19By the time her patent expired, her distracting device became standard equipment on every car
01:25in the world. Mary Anderson proved that some of the greatest inventions don't come from laboratories.
01:30They come from a mother's instinct to protect her family and solve a problem. This is her real
01:35photo. She showed us that you don't need a man's permission to have a world-changing idea.
01:39Today, every time you drive through a rainstorm or a blizzard, you are using the vision of a woman
01:45who refused to let the world stay in the dark.
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