He argued that Ford’s intermittent windshield wiper infringed patents he had been awarded starting in 1967 for a device he built after a champagne cork injured his eye at his own wedding and left him unable to blink normally in light rain. He had shown the mechanism to Ford engineers around that time; Ford introduced its own version in 1969 without a license from him.
The case took twelve years to reach a verdict. In January 1990, a Detroit jury found Kearns’s patents valid and found that Ford had infringed them. A second phase of the trial, on damages, did not go smoothly: an April 1990 jury deadlocked without reaching a verdict, and a second damages jury was empaneled in July. That jury awarded Kearns $5.2 million, covering royalties for 1978 through 1988 rather than the full scope of Ford’s sales of the feature. The commonly repeated claim that this figure was reduced by Judge Cohn from an earlier $6.3 million jury award doesn’t hold up: the Washington Post article most often cited for it reports $5.2 million as the jury’s own award directly, with no mention of $6.3 million or a judicial reduction.
The offer he turned down
It was between the January liability finding and the damages verdict that Ford’s side made its largest offer. According to Kearns’s associate Jay Jaffe, quoted in The Seattle Times in August 1990, Kearns turned down roughly $30 million because he wanted a court to put on the record that he, not Ford, had invented the mechanism. The same report, drawing on Ford’s own attorney Malcolm Wheeler, described Kearns as uninterested in a cash settlement generally; what he wanted instead was a supply contract making him Ford’s sole manufacturer of the device, a demand Ford never agreed to. Two independent contemporaneous sources support the substance of the $30 million figure, even though neither traces it to a court filing.
The number that doesn’t check out
The case ended in a settlement reached on November 14, 1990, rather than a further appeal. Wire and newspaper coverage from that week put a single figure on it: UPI’s November 14, 1990 report and The Washington Post’s coverage the next day both say $10.2 million, combining the reduced jury award, accrued interest, and roughly $1.2 million tied to a separate dispute over legal fees. The more precise $10,156,000 figure that circulates today, including in the 2008 film “Flash of Genius,” does not appear in either of those accounts or in any other contemporaneous record located for this article. Neither does the detail that the payment sat in escrow for three days before clearing; the Post’s November 15 story instead quotes a Ford spokesman saying the company would pay Kearns “within a matter of days” of the settlement, with roughly half going to his attorneys, and mentions no escrow period at all.
What the settlement actually paid for
Kearns did not keep most of it. Contemporary reporting described the $10.2 million being divided among several sets of lawyers who had represented him at different points, a roughly 30 percent contingency fee to his final legal team, payments to earlier attorneys he had fired mid-case, a share owed to his former wife under a 1989 divorce decree, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in litigation costs. By some later accounts, less than half of the settlement reached Kearns directly.
For long stretches of the litigation, Kearns represented himself rather than relying solely on hired counsel, a choice reporting at the time attributed to his distrust of lawyers after earlier teams took large fees or, in his telling, failed to press the case hard enough. That distrust is part of why so many parties had a claim on the final number by the time it arrived.
Why the myth travels better than the record
A settlement of exactly $10,156,000, paid out through an escrow account on a fixed three-day clock, is a better story than “roughly $10.2 million, paid within a matter of days.” It has the texture of a fact rather than the texture of a news estimate, and once a film puts a specific number on screen, that number tends to outcompete the vaguer figure a wire report actually used. The $30 million rejected offer survives the retelling because two independent sources back it. The settlement figure and the escrow detail do not survive the same test, because no source from 1990 supports them at that level of precision.
Kearns sued several other automakers over the same patents in the years after, with mixed results, and continued arguing publicly for changes to how patent litigation treats independent inventors. He died in 2005. What the record actually supports is narrower than the film’s version and, on its own terms, still holds: an inventor who had already won a jury’s finding turned down a settlement worth more than triple what the court eventually ordered, because the money was never the point he was trying to prove.