The Rear-View Mirror (3)
As affordable as the Ford Model T was, it was also about as basic a motor car as you could imagine, spawning a large and vibrant secondary market of manufacturers offering gizmos and gadgets to improve the comfort of the vehicle. According to Richard Snow’s I Invented the Modern Age, the rise of Henry Ford (2013), one of the 5,000 or so products available was the “Hind View Auto-Reflector”, which went on sale in August 1911, just three months after Harroun’s ground-breaking Indianapolis run.
In October 1914 Chester Weed from Brooklyn was granted a US Patent (US1114559A) for a “mirror attachment for automobiles”, intended to help drivers avoid blind spots, but it was not until the 1920s that the first widely distributed rear-view mirror become available. Like Harroun, Elmer Bergen’s motivation was not safety but speed or, more accurately, avoiding the consequences of speed. An electrical engineer from St Louis, Bergen was obsessed with putting his vehicles through their paces and the bane of his life were traffic police trying to enforce speed limits.
In 1921, he received a patent for a rear view mirror which he marketed as a “Cop-spotter”, designed to help the driver spot tailing police cars. He enjoyed some commercial success selling them as an aftersales device, but the market tailed off in the 1930s when car manufacturers began to include mirrors either as part of their standard offering or as an added extra.
What Bergen did do, though, was help to popularize the fitting of mirrors to motor cars, opening the way for the more safety-minded rear-view mirrors that we know today. Although they were only made mandatory in the UK in 1978, increasingly car manufacturers had fitted them as standard, gradually adding enhancements such as anti-glare coatings and multi-way adjustability. Now seen as an indispensable safety feature, even the emerging rear-view camera does not seem to pose an existential threat to them. The mantra of “clutch, mirror, signals” will still be the bane of learner drivers for years to come.
Its story shows how it takes a person with insight to develop what, to future generations, seems blindingly obvious.
