the.com/wiper
The only part of your car paid to fight weather and lose on a schedule.
means A rubber-bladed arm that sweeps rain, snow, or grime off a windshield so you can actually see where you're going.
from Straightforwardly built from 'wipe' plus the agent suffix '-er' — someone or something that wipes. 'Wipe' itself traces back to Old English 'wipian', meaning to rub clean. The windshield wiper as a device is a 20th-century invention, born alongside the automobile itself, when drivers needed a mechanical hand to do what their own hand had been doing through the window.
- invented by
- Mary Anderson, 1903, manually operated
- car makers scoffed
- called it a distracting, needless novelty
- intermittent wiper
- inspired by blinking, human eyelids, not engineering
- lifespan
- rubber degrades from sun, not just use