In November, 1962, Bob Kearns was driving his Ford Galaxie through the streets of Detroit when it started to rain lightly. Kearns turned the wipers on low. In those days, even the most advanced wipers had just two settings, one for steady rain and one for heavy rain; in a mizzling rain, they screeched back and forth across the glass, mesmerizing the driver, and occasionally causing accidents. Kearns’ vision was already impaired as a result of an accident nine years earlier, when, on his wedding night, he was hit in the left eye by a flying champagne cork. Now, straining to see through the windshield, half thinking about his lousy wipers and half thinking about his bad eye, Kearns had what the Wall Street Journal later called “the kind of inspiration that separates inventors from ordinary people.” He thought, Why can’t a wiper work more like an eyelid? Why can’t it blink? The idea for the intermittent windshield wiper entered his mind.

Sometime this year, a little more than three decades after his good idea came to him, Kearns will go to trial in a suit he has brought against General Motors. Kearns, who is sixty-five years old, has already defeated Ford and Chrysler in court, and he stands to collect more than twenty million dollars from them for infringing his patents on the intermittent windshield wiper. After the G.M. trial, Kearns will start on foreign automakers, beginning with Ferrari, and working his way through virtually the entire automobile industry worldwide. His remarkable success has made him one of the most famous inventors in the country, a hero to thousands of inventors with their own patent-infringement horror stories to tell. To others, he is a barnacle that has fastened itself to the underside of our patent system so tenaciously that the most powerful corporations in the world cannot pry it off.

Kearns is a small man, a few inches taller than elfin. His voice is high, nasal, and toneless, and his shoulders are stooped, perhaps from years of peering down at patent texts. His skin is pinkish, and his hair is startlingly white. According to Dennis, his oldest son, it turned white all at once, in 1976, when Kearns took apart an intermittent-windshield-wiper apparatus made by Mercedes and discovered that the great German carmaker had apparently infringed his wiper patents, too.

Kearns represented himself against Chrysler, and will do so again against G.M. His offices, Kearns Associates, are directly across the street from the Detroit federal courthouse, where his cases are tried. He can usually be found at his desk, half hidden behind heaps of motions and countermotions and books on trial procedure. The Associates are mainly Kearns’ family. He has six children, and the lawsuit has become the dominant event in their lives—and now their children are growing up with the case. The family is close, and the lawsuit has brought them closer. Four of his children have worked or are working full time for their father. The case is what they do. None of them have any legal training. They have learned on the job to write briefs, service documents, and deal with maneuvers pulled on them by the hundreds of lawyers working for the Big Three. “For the kids, the lawsuit is all we’ve ever known,” says Kearns’ daughter Kathy, who is thirty-one. “I mean, for us this is normal.”

There is widespread feeling in patent departments of corporations around the country that Kearns’ case represents a frightening precedent. A California inventor named Gilbert Hyatt, who was recently granted a basic patent on the microprocessor, is the latest example of the trend. In theory, Hyatt has billions coming to him from the dozens of corporations that use microprocessors. “This kind of stuff makes people who work for corporations very nervous,” Marty Adelman, a law professor and patent expert at Wayne State University, says. “The story today is not the big company screwing the little guy but the little guy screwing the big company. It’s getting easier and easier for the little guy to do it.”

The United States patent system is designed for the independent inventor—for the person whom Nikola Tesla described as “the lone worker who follows the fleeting inspiration of a moment and finally does something that has not been done before.” Two hundred years ago, when Thomas Jefferson created our patent system, all inventors were independent. Now most inventors work in huge corporate research centers. Individuals surrender their ideas to the corporation, and for doing so they receive regular salaries. But the patent system, together with the law that has accrued around it, still rests on the eighteenth-century idea of the inventor, and in court a lone inventor with a patent is a formidable opponent for any corporation to face. “I read all the patent cases, and rarely has there been a case in the last five years where the corporation has beaten an independent inventor,” Adelman says. “I tell all the corporate people who call me to testify against individuals, ‘Jesus, guys, you’re up against it.’ ”

The most frightening thing about Kearns, from the automobile companies’ point of view, is that he is not particularly interested in money. He wants justice. “They think they can pay me thirty million dollars and put me on a park bench,” he says. “Well, Bob Kearns is not somebody’s lackey.” When I first met him, a few months after he received ten million dollars from Ford, he was living by himself in a small, dark unfurnished apartment in Houston. A sleeping bag was on the floor, and boxes of legal documents were everywhere—on the floor, on the kitchen counters, stacked on the toilet. He has since bought a Colonial house and some property on the eastern shore of Maryland (it’s right next to a house owned by Mario Boyardee, the canned-spaghetti heir), but he hardly ever goes there. He sleeps on friends’ couches around Detroit, or on the floor of his office. He says he simply wants to make windshield wipers. That is all he has ever wanted. He will go on suing until automobile companies around the world are stopped from manufacturing his wiper, and he can make it himself.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office is in Crystal City, a government development in Arlington, Virginia. The buildings are glass and steel, and sleek, in the modern federal style, and the place has a sort of splendid isolation about it which goes nicely with being the city of invention. On the ground floor of the Patent Office is the Search Room, a vast space filled with patents. The Patent Office has the largest collection of patents in the world. Here or upstairs, in the library, are Balinese patents and Manchurian patents, and English patents dating back to 1623. There are German dyestuff patents that were confiscated by the United States during the First World War and became part of the foundation of the American chemical industry. More than five million United States patents have been issued since 1790, when the first one went to Samuel Hopkins, of Pittsford, Vermont, for a new way of making potash, and they are all stored here, in paper form, stacked face up in an immense lattice of metal cubbyholes—about a hundred bright ideas to each cubby, and thousands of inspirations to each long, dark row. Feathery dust lies on some of the older patents. Patent searchers can be found in the aisles, scouring their fingertips lightly together to remove the dust, and plucking flakes of rotting patents from their jackets and sweaters.