Chris Rossi/The Gazette
Bob Kearns of Germantown at his childhood home in Montgomery Village. His father, Robert Kearns, is the subject of the film, "Flash of Genius."
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Out in theaters now, "Flash of Genius" tells the story of how Robert W. Kearns took on Ford Motor Co. for swiping his idea for a windshield wiper that paused between strokes.
The film, released two weeks ago, has Greg Kinnear as the obsessive, cantankerous Kearns, unwavering in his quest to prove that he had been wronged. It depicts the part that his family played in poring through court records and with some excruciating detail, climaxes in Kearns' courtroom arguments that vindicated his name and awarded him nearly $30 million from Ford and Chrysler.
Left out is the six years that Kearns worked at the National Bureau of Standards — now the National Institutes of Standards and Technology — where he designed a standard for measuring skid resistance on roadways. Left out is the fact that five of six Kearns children went through Gaithersburg High School and that three now live in Germantown, Rockville and Oxford (the other three live in Michigan).
Condensing a 30-year timeline into 12 years — and into 120 minutes of screen time – the only local reference is Kearns riding a bus to Washington when he is stopped by two Maryland State Police troopers and taken to the "Rockville State Facility" after a mental breakdown.
Kearns, who died in a Sykesville nursing home in 2005, was an electrical engineering professor in Detroit in the 1960s when he conceived the idea for the "Kearns Blinking-Eye Motor" windshield wiper. He peddled his invention to the Big Three auto giants, and though they turned him away, Ford debuted its identical "intermittent windshield wiper" in 1969.
The family moved to Montgomery Village in 1971. After a mental breakdown in 1976 brought on by the realization that the entire automotive industry was using his design, Kearns was determined to take them all on.
What started as 26 lawsuits was boiled down to two — Ford and Chrysler. The Ford case started in 1976, and with the help of his children, Kearns ran the operation out of the home on Lookout Place, at several points rejecting offers from Ford for as much as $30 million.
For son Bob Kearns, at 14 the youngest in the house, that meant being the only person allowed to greet visitors.
"I would answer the door because I couldn't be served by [court] process servers. I had carte blanche because I couldn't be touched," said Bob Kearns, who lives in Germantown. "It was pretty stealthy coming in and out of my house."
For oldest son Dennis Kearns, who lives in Michigan, it meant being his father's primary aide while commuting to College Park for a degree in criminal justice — poring through 35 four-drawer cabinets filled with paperwork and hauling it all in a moving van back and forth from their basement to hotel rooms and courtrooms in Detroit.
Robert Kearns won the Ford case in 1990 and received a $10 million settlement. The Chrysler case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1995 and ended in an $18 million judgment in Kearns' favor. After the settlements, Kearns moved from Montgomery Village to a home in Queenstown, on the Eastern Shore.
"Flash of Genius" took 10 years to make, slowed in part when Kearns died in 2005 from brain cancer complicated by Alzheimer's disease. It has garnered generally positive reviews and grossed $2.25 million.
Throughout the production, the family played a close role, Dennis Kearns said, from making script notes to taking trips to the sets in Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario. The family got a private screening in Michigan, and several family members went to film festival premieres, including a red-carpet screening in Los Angeles with the film's stars.
"I think everybody's got some aspect of their life that they feel kicked around about, where they felt helpless," said Bob Kearns. "And I think that in this what I'll call game-show age, where everybody's just trying to get paid, it's kind of refreshing to see somebody stand up for his principles and say it's about more than getting paid."
