The history of invention is populated with eccentric and willful characters, stories of serendipity, and accompanying flashes of insight. Bob Kearns was one of those characters. The tale of his epic and lonely fight against Ford Motor Company, which ended up destroying his marriage and taking over his life, kicks off this fascinating new collection of magazine stories by New Yorker Staff Writer John Seabrook (pictured to the right.) 
This collection, as Seabrook explains in the book's introduction, is "about inventors, innovators, engineers, and entrepreneurs, some of whom are trying to get something built (or, in the case of the Antikythera Mechanism, re-built) and some of whom are coping with the consequences of their inventions."
In addition to Kearns, we meet David Karp, "The Fruit Detective." Karp is a re-habillitated drug addict and Wall Street trader, who becomes a man obsessed with fruit. His work is to track down exotic fruits for high-end Manhattan groceries. We also meet Will Wright, "The Game Master," who is the creator of Spore; Chuck Hoberman, the creator of the Hoberman Sphere; Leslie Robertson, the engineer behind the design of the World Trade Center; and Stan Winston, the Hollywood genius and creator of the monster robot-puppets in blockbusters such as Jurassic Park and* Aliens*.
In the last chapter, we even meet the author's grandfather Charles Franklin (CF) Seabrook and many other members of his family, who were caught up in the drama of CF's business empire. CF turned his own father's farm and others' in South Jersey into Seabrook Farms, a large and extremely successful producer of frozen vegetables. In 1955, Life magazine called Seabrook Farms "the biggest vegetable factory on earth."
Seabrook maps out these individuals' lives, and the circumstances that produced many of the mechanisms and inventions that now make up the fabric of our daily lives. By the time you finish reading "Game Master," you'll have a new appreciation for the part in Spore that lets you colonize other planets. And you'll never look at a packet of Seabrook Farms frozen broccoli raab or spinach the same again after reading "The Spinach King." The same goes for the way you think about the Golden Gate Bridge after you read "American Scrap."
The book's title refers to the first story of the collection, which in October was released as a movie starring Greg Kinnear as Bob Kearns. Kearns is the central animating character as the single-minded seeker of justice who spent three decades of his life suing Ford, Chrysler and General Motors for stealing his patented configuration that brought the world his version of the intermittent windshield wiper. The amazing aspect of the yarn is that Kearns managed to win his cases by doing much of his own lawyering.
Seabrook's story about Kearns first appeared in 1993. Nevertheless, it still resonates because it's increasingly ideas, rather than by manufacturing, that drive economic growth in the developed world. Thus any stories that bring color and drama to the dry subject of patent law performs the important job of illustrating to the public at large why there's a crucial need to clear the jungle-vine thicket of patent laws and litigation that has grown to threaten a crucial component of economic growth. Admittedly, Kearns' story is unusual, but Seabrook takes this story-telling opportunity to explain how the patent system has evolved, and why we need to reform it.
Seabrook manages to weave in the nuances of a complex reality, and to explain the history of how we reward inventors as he tells us the strange story of Kearns and the inadvertent role he played in creating our mangled system, which Congress, the Supreme Court and industry lobbyists have spent three years and millions of dollars trying to improve.
Kearns, a mechanical engineer, came up with the idea of the intermittent windshield wiper in 1962 as he drove through Detroit in the November rain thinking about one of his eyes. A champagne cork had damaged it when he was opening a bottle on his wedding night nine-years earlier. He thought: Why can't windshield wipers be more like blinking eyes?
Kearns worked on the idea in his basement over the next year and showed it to executives at Ford, which was also working on a similar idea, by Seabrook's account. Those executives liked Kearns' idea and gave him the specifications that his system would have to meet before they would use his concept.
But despite the initial display of enthusiasm, the Ford people ended up turning their backs on Kearns. Nevertheless, he had obviously made an impression: Ford come out with its own intermittent windshield wipers with the same design six years later. Other car manufacturers followed.
Kearns eventually sued Ford and the other car companies for patent infringement in 1978. It took 12 years and the enlistement of his entire family as paralegals for his case to get to trial. When it did, the judge ended up declaring a mistrial because the jury couldn't decide how much he should be awarded for Ford's infringement. Kearns eventually settled the suit for a little more than $10 million. This came after several sets of fired lawyers and a refusal of a previous offer to settle for $30 million. Kearns declared that his crusade was never about money, but about justice. Unlike many patent holders of modern times, Kearns actually dreamed of manufacturing his own windshield wipers -- he wasn't out to land a windfall from a giant corporation.
Kearns also won another infringement suit against Chrysler. But he never obtained the judgement of willful infringement that he spent his life campaigning for.
"The moral is that unlawful conduct does pay," he said after the Chrysler trial concluded. "I don't see how any of us could go home to our children and say that it does not."
After everything that Seabrook documented -- for example the fact that Ford and other companies at the time were already exploring the idea of intermittent windshield wipers -- Kearns' conclusion is one that best illustrates the frustrating reality behind society's attempts to pinpoint the originator of ideas: That many people have ideas, some of which are obvious to those who are expert in the field, and some that are not, and attempts to draw lines that everyone can agree on is hard.
The trick is to agree on the rules for drawing those lines. That is something that Congress and the courts need to accomplish in 2009.
(Images: Courtesy St. Martin's Press. On the right is the author John Seabrook, who is the author of "Flash of Genius and Other True Stories of Invention." He's also the descendant of "The Spinach King," one of the characters in his concluding story of the volume.)
