Tech Talk

I watched Flash of Genius in a sort of slack-jawed amazement. The movie, which opened over the weekend, stars Greg Kinnear as Bob Kearns, inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper who brought car companies to their knees in the early 90s by winning a patent infringement case with GM.

The climactic scene is a patent trial! Sure, plenty of movies have trial scenes--but patent law is notoriously opaque. Throw in the complexities of engineering and a mentally disturbed engineer representing himself, and you've got the makings of cinematic Ambien. Mercifully, the trial moves at a brisk clip, with plenty of drama, and the most cogent explanation of the legal standard of non-obviousness that I've ever heard.

And of course, there was the flash of genius, Kearns' "eureka moment," when looking in the mirror and watching his eye blink, he realized he could make a windshield wiper work the same way. I was so excited when I came out of the movie that I started madly Twittering my review.

As I tweeted, I got to thinking about the nature of eureka moments. Kearns' eureka moment was actually several moments spread over a decade. Kearns blinded himself in one eye when popping a champagne cork on his wedding night. He and his wife recount this incident throughout the movie as the moment--but the wiper wasn't even a twinkle in his black eye at that time. Then there was the time he was driving his family in a downpour and he was frustrated by a lack of wiper-speed variability. Then there was the moment when he looks at his eye blinking in the mirror, and the first two moments came together--Eureka! Kearns' flash of genius.

Hmm. Flashes of genius, maybe. Or flashes that result in a moment of insight.

But that's really kind of nitpicky. Less so is the scene where Kearns' wiper works--the first time he turns it on. No way, I thought. And when I read John Seabrook's 1993 New Yorker article "The Flash of Genius" on which the movie was loosely (as it turns out) based, I learned that Kearns actually spent months perfecting his invention.

In fact, comparing the article to the movie is an object lesson in how Hollywood distorts complicated issues and complex people into a digestible package of entertainment. There's a laundry list of differences between legal fact and movie fiction. For instance, in the movie Kearns is a professor at Wayne State University teaching applied electrical engineering. In reality, at the time he invented the wiper, Kearns, who had a masters in mechanical engineering and would eventually teach at Wayne State, was commuting to Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, trying to earn his PhD. He came home on weekends to be with his wife and family. The real hero of the story should be his wife Phyllis, who had to take care of six kids by herself, while holding down a substitute teaching job (wait, was that true or made up?).

Finally, there's the explanation of the technology behind the intermittent wiper, or rather lack thereof. In the movie, we come to understand that Kearns invention is electronic rather than mechanical, and that it relies on simple components: a transistor, a capacitor and a variable resistor. How these work together in a novel circuit design (the Invention) is never explained in the movie. But how hard would it have been to have Kinnear explain the mechanism to his kids, using Seabrook's elegant explanation:

The resistor and the capacitor together were the timer, and the transistor worked as the switch. The resistor, which the driver could adjust with a knob, controlled the rate of current flowing into the capacitor. When the voltage in the capacitor reached a certain level, it triggered the transistor; the transistor turned on, and the wipers wiped once. The running of the wiper motor drained voltage out of the capacitor; it sank below the threshold level of the transistor, and the transistor turned off. The wipers dwelled until the capacitor recharged.

Having said all that, this is movie well worth seeing. How many times do you see circuit diagrams, even as set pieces, on the silver screen? How many times do engineers star in a film? Kinnear gives a terrific performance. And the ending, though happy enough, underscores the price the late professor Kearns and his family paid for his obsession. See the movie. Then read the article.