In order to understand the future you must first understand the past and in doing so you will have attained an awareness of the backdrop context in which the wiper blades was engineered and continues to develop. The reader by now perhaps has some comprehension of what a wiper blades actually is and what function it performs in the world. Turn your mind back to the last time you got into your car and turned on the ignition. Those things moving backwards and forwards by the windscreen are your wiper blades and their responsibility is to keep the wind screen cleansed and free from dirt and rain. These days this simple design can be found anywhere from cars all the way to planes and hover craft. In fact anywhere you discover wind screens you will find wiper blades they are even adapted by professional window cleaners these days and do a nice job cleaning large sheet windows.

The wiper blade itself is usually made from rubber and shapes itself to the glass using its tremendous flex. The wiper blade is added to an arm made usually of metal which is attached to an electric motor; the electric motor is driven by power generated from the engine. An electro magnet under the bonnet is used to convert the electrical power into kinetic motion and this in turn actuates the motion of the wiper blade through time and space. It’s a normal system but also one which is quite effective and like all elegant solutions this one has stood the acid test of time. There are many types of this one simple theme yet they all have the same core setup, these days there are even automated wiper blade which sense the volume of rainfall and adjust their speed accordingly.

Some wipers have several different speed settings which the driver can use on their own and use to tailor the quantity of motion with the quantity of rain currently falling from the sky. If you are looking for great quality wipers at great prices today the best place to buy them is online. You don’t want to be exploited by being locked into franchise models which the garage insists you buy from them for greatly inflated marked up prices. You can literally save hundreds of pound every year if you absolutely take some time to look online for some wipers competitive sales. In fact don’t take my word for it go and look up some now and you will see for yourself what a great range and value you will find in the online world. I buy nearly all my things online these days, books, films, video games, fishing rods wipers, anything; they all turn up cheaper online. This is the power of the internet it brings together all the sellers into one big market place where the intense competition drives the prices right down. It truly is a buyers market at the minute so get out there and start surfing the web looking for some additional wipers today. If you want to save even more money get some made out of silicone, these will last forever.

The simple wiper blades may seem dispensable but this would be a sorry under estimation for you see they are in fact entirely vital to the successful operation of a motor car. In fact the basic wiper blades design is so vital that it without it your car would promptly be declared unfit for the road by the government and hauled away to be sold as scrap. According to the guys in the know who deal with this sort of thing on a regional basis the single largest cause of traffic accident is caused by guys with bad visibility and bad visibility is caused by yes you’ve guessed it, poor wiper blades. So what is the thing to do then, to wiper blades or not to wiper blades that is the question, well if it isn’t entirely obvious by now allow me to explain. With out a good pair of wiper blades in action in beautiful synchrony the wind screen quickly sinks into a quagmire of filth and stink.

You see all the many millions of little bugs you hit with your car start to build up a bit soon and soon this bug juice or beetle juice if you will commences to form a thick opaque screen of sludge which makes it impossible for any driver to see the autobahn clearly unless you have x-ray vision. Do you have x-ray eysight? Do you wear your underpants on top of your normal clothes? If your answer is yes then perhaps you don’t need to get new wiper blade but for the rest of us simple mortals we need the ability to clean our wind screens of grease and bugs whenever we find it necessary. The great thing about having cool new wind screen wiper blade is that in the accident the fuzz pull you over because they believe you are a criminal they now have to go packing and can no longer smack you down for not having wind screen wipers. If you’re searching for the ultimate in pimped out wiper blade accessories then look no further than the flat wiper blade.

This small demon packs a genuine punch both in terms of its aesthetic impact, which is huge, and its performance in poor weather conditions. The flat windscreen wipers can’t be beat sucker its makes your ride look like some kind of down low super race car. They are also aerodynamic so when you are salooning down the boulevard looking for your homies these little pieces of heaven will actually increase your velocity slightly. With these attached you will have the coolest car and you too will be able to beat other cars at the lights. They are also pretty ok at wiping the wind screen if that’s what you’re into. The undisputed champion of the windscreen wipers world however is the king daddy the silicone windscreen wipers, fix these to some flat windscreen wipers and you will be unbreakableto be reckoned with.

Every type of wiper blades combination in existence today has a young lady called Ms Anderson for its acclaim. All the way back in nineteen hundred and four a individual of Alabama came up with the forerunner prototype that would blaze a trail for all following styles of wiper blades, a hundred years such is the success of this straight forward design that it is located at all four corners of the Earth. Her everyday design was propelled by hand and required a giant amount of manual energy to operate; things have definitely come a long way with the latest models today electric powered and rain sensor accoutered. This style of a simple hand shaft apparatus was inspired by the tram drivers in New York who were compelled to clean their wind screens by putting their hands out of the cab and onto the wind screen in order to wiper it. The initial wiper blades model was composed of a system of twin brushes capable of wiping down a straight piece of glass by means of a handle. Later designs would add the now common rubber wiper blades and eventually propelled by an electric motor. The fore runner of the electric motor was something named a vacuum pump, this device created a pressure difference which could then be harnessed to create kinetic energy.

The problem with this device was that as the engine revs went up the power of the vacuum descended rapidly, so at high speeds the wipers would come to a total halt. The wide spread up take of the wipers was in a big part due to the industrial revolution and a man named Mr Ford who made it his work in life to manufacture affordable cars. By nine teen sixteen the wipers was fixed as standard to all automobiles which soon started to number in the millions before the end of the twentieth century. Today you will find this awesome windscreen wipers design on all sorts from boats and trucks to even hovercraft and helicopters.

The latest generation of replacement wiper blades has many different settings which can be tailored appropriately to the prevailing weather states such is the wide spread success of this everyday format. The latest innovation comes in the form of rain sensors, these devices were invented by Citroen and measure the amount of resistance met by the replacement wiper blades and changes the power accordingly. Another great leap forwards in replacement wiper blades design came about when the standard rubber insert was eventually replaced by an enterprising individual with an insert made exclusively of a substance known as silicone. This revolutionary new material makes life much easier for all concerned, by its very nature it is an extremely durable substance lasting numerous millions of cycles and out performing all other types of replacement wiper blades. Silicone is so incredibly underactive that it can be evident to moisture, cold, heat, ozone, and acid, pollution any thing and it will not decompose. Another great feature is its amazing feature to resist changes in temperature; silicone replacement wiper blades will not stick to your wind screen into his winter nor melt to your windscreen in summer.

Northern Europe is no seclusion to the affliction of brisk winters and sweltering summers. Fortunately for us we developed a state of the art weather centre which is the want of much of the world. This weather centre can be used to precisely guess short term weather conditions, which is particularly useful in the winter. The botheration with many replacement wiper blades these days is that they are all made from a type of rubber, now this works quite well in moderate temperatures but in any extreme climate conditions the material will tend to break. Further compounding this thing is that when winter strikes and the weather centre goes into overdrive estimating more grit and salt for the roads, it’s our rubber replacement wiper blades which be punished. This is the result as a by product of all the hard work invested by our dedicated road network maintenance teams the salt and grit from the road accordingly end up destroying the delicate rubber on our wipers.

Salt and grit are our basic and last line of defence when snow and ice threatens to close roads and cause havoc with our network road systems and wipers. Salt and grit work in two basic but complementary ways, one, they reduce the melting point of ice meaning the ice will turn back into water, two, they increase friction so cars don’t tail spin crazily out of control like snoopy on ice. The problem with this technique is that the salt attacks the delicate rubber of our cars wipers considerably reducing their life span and performance overall. Salt and grit are both very dense and very sharp, they act like sand paper and actively wear away the rubber on the replacement wiper blades not to mention breaking the glass on out wind screens. Once this process is under way the tell tale signs of streaks and unbalanced wiping will be evident in the replacement wiper blades performance. Another thing to consider with the whole grit and ice things is that the salt from the roads will quickly be thrown up onto the wind screen and once this composite dries it will form a nice thick layer aborting hapless drivers from telling where the heck they are going.

Now this can be simply solved by taking out a jar of warm soapy water and getting to work on the wind screen when you get to the house from work in the dark and the dead of winter. Another possibility is to utilize some form of washer fluid based on alcohol to help dissolve the ice and salt mixture clouding the wind screen but again unhappily this simple step will afflict the life span of your rubber wiper blade massively, you see they just aren’t engineered for these kinds of conditions. Or perhaps if I was more of a Machiavellian person I would suspect the manufacturers were advisedly enforcing this kind of planned obsolescence product in order to maintain a constant flow of new customers. This type of practice is wide spread, not just in the wiper blade industry, fortunately there is an answer, silicone wiper blades, these do not wear, these do not acquiesce from the effects of salt or ice, and they are extremely long lasting.

The sort of replacement wiper blades we generally recognise today are all retrograded from the configuration patented in 1903 by a Mrs Mary Anderson, of Birmingham, Alabama, United States. By contrast to today’s high tech wipers these were extremely atavistic. The basic apparatus consisted of a hand crank which was used by the driver from inside the cab. Mary Anderson was inspired to create the first wipers about a trip to New York City where she took account of the tram drivers cleansing their wind screens by hand. Once the basic wiper blades model was engineered it was left to other means to exhort the wiper blades arm past the wind screen. The first blossoming in this area was the vacuum system which administered force through what is called a vacuum pump. This appliance utilised the difference in air pressure in the inside and the outside of the intake manifold to produce a vacuum force.

This augmentation was thanks to the start of the industrial revolution when Henry Ford started the Ford Motor Company and initiated a plan of generating millions of auto mobiles with wipers fixed as standard. The internal combustion engine was in many ways the catalyst which generated the wind screen wiper into its present standing in society. Today replacement wiper blades are truly ubiquitous discovered on every type of vehicle imaginable from the common car, to aeroplanes, helicopters, boats and even hover craft. The issue with this set up back then was the speed of the wiper blades was bounded by the amount of force produced from the vacuum. So at high speeds this was conversely proportional and the replacement wiper blades came to a all-out stop, unlike today’s modern electrically driven types. When the AC motor was revved the wipers would go at an incredible rate but when the engine was compromised going up a hill they would all but stop. This arrangement has since been abandoned by the superior electric replacement wiper blades thanks to the engineering of the battery where energy can be amassed and dispensed at will.

By the mid nineteen sixties the vacuum powered replacement wiper blades was all but extinct and electric wipers were fitted as standard. Today the modern electric replacement wiper blades has many variable functional settings, these include a body of speed settings to suit the prevailing weather conditions and intermittent speed settings for when it is only spitting. Another innovation is the rain sensing system developed by Citroen of France in the nineteen seventies and fitted to its Maserati. This arrangement didn’t sense the rain directly but instead measured the amount of resistance encountered when wiping the windscreen, more resistance indicated less rain water therefore the battery conceived less power. When it rained the wiper blades would bear down on less resistance and so the wiper blades would go at a faster rate for that cause. The wiper blades has to be by hand turned on and off as well prior to use. Today’s rain sensing technology is superior; it will turn on the wipers itself and will adjust the speed of the wipers by directly sensing the level of rain fall.

Could the Internet be any filthier than it is right now? Today’s show highlights some of the more disturbing stories that we haven’t been able to get to over the past few weeks, but not before complaining about the dirty microphone screens pressing up against our mouths on a daily basis. Wilson seems to like it!

Teenagers love money.

(Credit: [email protected]/Flickr)

We scavenge the depths of the dirty Internet to bring you a couple interesting, albeit dirty, stories, like this one about a teen in New Zealand who stumbled upon some “artistic” photos of his mother, and instead of gouging his eyes out with the nearest sharp object, he auctioned them off on the Internet!

Ugh, the story gets even more messed up though, and you’ll never guess what his Mother does when she finds out what her son’s been up to at her expense. Hint: he doesn’t get in trouble.

That story actually segues well into the next one, where we finally ask the question, “Is the Internet destroying porn as we know it?”

The answer is a mix of yes and no, as CNET blogger Chris Matyszczyk (how do you pronounce that?!) helps us figure out why 90-minute adult
movies are quickly getting fazed out in lieu of 335-second clips on sites like YouPorn and XTube. On the other hand (no pun intended), there are plenty of examples of money getting poured into big budget pornographic films, some with a budget of over 1 million dollars. Although we have no personal opinions on the matter, since none of us have actually seen said video genre, we reference very informative articles we’ve read on the Internet.

Stay tuned to the second half of today’s episode to see how you can instantly obtain 5,000 Twitter followers and listen to a hilarious Calls from the Public with a special appearance by none other than the much-missed Sally Henderson!

EPISODE 380

Download today’s podcast

Subscribe in iTunes audio | Suscribe to iTunes (video) | Subscribe in RSS Audio | Subscribe in RSS Video

…

Originally posted at The 404