To be fair, Kearns did represent himself for most of that legal battle. I sure the cases would have been settled much more quickly had he been backed by MIT's lawyers.

Lots of inventions like this seem obvious in hindsight.

Clearly, without this invention, wipers to this day would still work on a sigle speed, calibrated for heavy rain. Millions of tons of wasted rubber and plastic, etc.

The specific mechanism was quite clever.

"Someone would've eventually invented this" can be said about everything we use. Someone would've figured out the Internet, internal combustion, flying, etc. That doesn't mean it's not a notable accomplishment to do so.

But does every "notable accomplishment" require a 20-year monopoly?

Anytime there's a foot race to the patent office, we, the consumers, are the inevitable loser.

There’s a movie that is sympathetic to kearns. Not the truth, might give some insight.

Also it’s a pretty good movie. So likely not a total waste of time either way.