Bill Smitrovich as Judge Michael Franks.Mitch Pileggi as Macklin Tyler, Ford executive.Dermot Mulroney as Gil Previck, financial support.Greg Kinnear as Robert Kearns, inventor.The closing credits indicate that Robert later wins an $18.7 million judgement from Chrysler Corporation as well. 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. Toward the end of the trial, Ford offers Kearns a $30 million settlement, but without admitting wrongdoing. Eventually Kearns' ex-wife and children support him in his endeavor. Thus begins years of legal battles, during which time his wife leaves him, and he becomes estranged from his children.Īt trial, Kearns represents himself after attorney Gregory Lawson withdraws from the case, because Robert refuses to settle. Finally released when doctors decide his obsession has subsided, he returns home a broken man, determined to receive public acknowledgement for his accomplishment. Instead, Maryland state troopers remove him from the bus and escort him to a mental hospital, where he is treated for a nervous breakdown. 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. Time passes, and when nobody contacts Kearns, he begins placing phone calls that are never returned.įrustrated, Kearns attends a Ford dealers convention at which the latest model of the Mustang is unveiled, promoting the intermittent wiper as a selling point. He presents Ford with the pricing information it requested along with a sample unit, then waits for their response. Considering this to be sufficient commitment from the company, Kearns rents a warehouse he plans to use as a factory and forges ahead. 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. Kearns refuses to explain how his mechanism works until he hammers out a favorable deal with the corporation. He patents his invention and demonstrates it for Ford researchers, who had been working on a similar project without success.
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. The incident inspires him to create a wiper blade mechanism modeled on the human eye, which blinks every few seconds rather than continuously. As he drives his Ford Galaxie through a light rain, the constant movement of the windshield wipers irritates his troubled vision. A decade later, he is happily married to Phyllis and the father of six children. On his wedding night in 1953, an errant champagne cork renders Detroit college engineering professor Robert Kearns almost completely blind in his left eye. It remained in theaters for only three weeks, and eventually grossed only $4.6 million worldwide, coming up short against its $20 million budget. The film opened on 1,098 screens in the United States on October 3, 2008, and earned $2.2 million on its opening weekend. The film's title comes from the phrase " flash of genius" (like "stroke of genius"), which is patent law terminology that was in effect from 1941 to 1952, although Kearns's patent was filed in 1964 it held that the inventive act must come into the mind of an inventor as a kind of epiphany, and not as the result of tinkering. The story focuses on Robert Kearns (played by Greg Kinnear) and his legal battle against the Ford Motor Company after they developed an intermittent windshield wiper based on ideas the inventor had patented. Philip Railsback wrote the screenplay based on a 1993 New Yorker article by John Seabrook. Flash of Genius is a 2008 American biographical drama film directed by Marc Abraham.
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