In the Blink of an Eye

Proverbs 20:12
“The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the LORD hath made even both of them.”

Did you know that the intermittent windshield wiper on your car was discovered in the blink of an eye? According to the book Inspired Evidence: Only One Reality, here’s the story of how it came about.

Drivers today take the intermittent windshield wiper for granted. After all, every car has them. But before 1969, drivers weren’t so lucky. Their wipers had just two speeds – fast and slow. And most of the time, neither speed was exactly what the driver wanted.

Back in the early 1960s, Robert Kearns, an engineering professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, was having trouble seeing as he was driving his car on a misty night. He had nearly been blinded on his wedding night a decade earlier when the cork from a bottle of champagne shot into his left eye. With his limited vision and the mist on his windshield, he started thinking about the human eye which has its own kind of wiper, the eyelid, that automatically closes and opens every few seconds.

In 1963, Kearns built his first intermittent wiper system using off-the-shelf electronic components. In his design, the interval between wipes was determined by the rate of current flow into a capacitor. When the charge in the capacitor reached a certain voltage, the capacitor was discharged, activating the wiper motor for one cycle. Ford incorporated intermittent wipers on the company’s Mercury line, beginning with the 1969 models.

The intermittent windshield wiper – like many other practical inventions – was inspired by the designs God put into His creation.

Prayer: Lord Jesus, Your creation is filled with so many examples of ingenious design, I can’t even begin to count them all! I praise Your most holy name! Amen.

Author: Steven J. Schwartz
Ref: J.V. Vette and B. Malone, Inspired Evidence: Only One Reality, June 24 (Search for the Truth Publications, 2011).

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