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Flash of Genius

On his wedding night in 1953, an errant champagne cork renders Detroit college engineering professor Robert Kearns almost completely blind in his left eye. Ten years later, he is happily married to Phyllis and the father of six children. As he drives his Ford Galaxie through a light rain, the constant movement of the windshield wipers irritates his troubled vision. The incident inspires him to create a wiper blade mechanism modeled on the human eye, which blinks every few seconds rather than continuously.

With financial support from Gil Previck, Kearns converts his basement into a laboratory and develops a prototype he tests in a fish tank before installing it in his car. He patents his invention and demonstrates it for Ford researchers, who had been working on a similar project without success. Kearns refuses to explain how his mechanism works until he hammers out a favorable deal with the corporation. Impressed with Kearns' results, executive Macklin Tyler asks him to prepare a business plan detailing the cost of the individual units, which Kearns intends to manufacture himself. Considering this to be sufficient commitment from the company, Kearns rents a warehouse he plans to use as a factory and forges ahead. He presents Ford with the pricing information it requested along with a sample unit, and then waits for their response. Time passes, and when nobody contacts Kearns, he begins placing phone calls that are never returned.

Frustrated, Kearns attends a Ford dealers' convention at which the latest model of the Mustang is unveiled, promoting the intermittent wiper as a selling point. Realizing the company has used his idea without giving him credit or payment for it, Kearns begins his descent into a despair so deep he boards a Greyhound bus and heads for Washington, D.C., where he apparently hopes to find legal recourse. Instead, Maryland state troopers remove him from the bus and escort him to a psychiatric hospital, where he is treated for a nervous breakdown. Finally released when doctors decide his obsession has subsided, he returns home a broken man, determined to receive public acknowledgement for his accomplishment. Thus begins years of legal battles, during which time his wife leaves him, and he becomes estranged from his children.

At trial, Kearns represents himself after attorney Gregory Lawson withdraws from the case, because Kearns refuses to settle. Eventually Kearns' ex-wife and children support him in his endeavor. Toward the end of the trial, Ford offers Kearns a $30 million settlement, but without admitting wrongdoing. Kearns decides to leave his fate in the hands of the jury, who determine that Ford infringed his patents, but that the infringement was not deliberate. The jury awards him $10.1 million. The closing credits indicate that Kearns later wins an $18.7 million judgement from Chrysler Corporation as well.