Windscreen Wipers – why bother?
Who’d have thought that there are whole clubs dedicated to old cars? Heaven help you though if you call it an old car ... from now on I shall refer to them as hot rods or classic cars.
As far as I can tell, the one thing they all have in common seems to be their windscreen wipers – or lack thereof. They either don’t have them, have only one, or they just don’t work at all.
Here I was thinking that the owners didn’t take their cars out in the rain so as not to spoil the duco. Now I know the real reason. Bloody windscreen wipers don’t work!
I had my first ride in a hot rod just recently so I was quite excited. I watched a couple of old Happy Days episodes for a refresher course on being ‘cool’. I’m not sure I could tell you what type of car it was but it was beautifully painted in orange and had luxurious cream leather upholstery.
Everything was going well until it started to rain so, to overcome the lack of adequate windscreen wipers, the driver sped up. I am guessing the theory behind this mad stunt was that speed would deflect the water off the windscreen. Yeah, right! That might have worked with a modern-day, sloping, aerodynamically designed windscreen but not your straight up and down vertical model.
Owners of these cars are able to replace entire motors but can’t get the windscreen wipers to work! Do they not think that’s an important safety feature? I notice that they put in seat-belts and I’m sure they didn’t come standard in the original versions.
The windscreen wiper was invented circa 1903 and, just for the record, was invented by a woman, Mary Anderson. I’m sure the idea came to her when she was travelling with a male partner who, way back then, also thought it was a good idea to speed up to deflect the water. As the saying goes, “necessity is the mother of invention”.
On the other hand, maybe she invented it one rainy evening stuck at home, bored to tears baking scones, making cups of tea for her husband and playing parlour games. She possibly thought, “if only we could go for a drive on this rainy night and I could pay somebody to make me tea and scones and I don’t have to keep pretending to enjoy playing bridge and charades”. Next thing you know, cars are fitted with windscreen wipers. As they say, the rest is history. We now have coffee shops on every corner, Devonshire teas served in the country and all of this because of Mary Anderson. I really don’t think she gets as much credit as she deserves.
Anyway, back to my story. On arrival at our destination on that fateful rainy night it was all I could do not to fall to my knees and kiss the ground in true Papal style. If I had my own door, I probably would have but, being a two-door meant I had to wait for the people in front to get out and then I had to manoeuvre my sizeable butt out of the back seat making sure not to trip over the running-board. This probably looked ‘uncool’ enough without falling to my knees and kissing the bitumen. Also, never once did I see any of Richie Cunningham’s girls do that. Mind you, they didn’t go out in the rain either.
It’s a shame that the beautiful cream leather upholstery now has my fingerprints permanently embedded into the back doors.
Asked would I go again – hell yes! I will, however, be sure to check the weather forecast.
No comments:
Post a Comment