Meet the American who invented windshield wipers, Mary Anderson, Alabama entrepreneur [Video]

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.