The invention of the car rearview mirror can be traced back to 1911, when British female racing driver Dorothy Levitt first proposed the concept of using a mirror to observe the rear of the vehicle in her book. However, its practical application in vehicles is credited to American racing driver Ray Harroun in the same year, who installed a rearview mirror on his race car during the Indianapolis 500, though its stability was insufficient initially due to technical limitations. In 1921, Elmer Berger officially patented the rearview mirror and began mass production, promoting it to become a standard configuration for civilian cars. In recent years, with the development of electronic technology, solutions combining streaming rearview mirrors and cameras with central control screens have gradually emerged. These solutions reduce blind spots through wide-angle lenses and image processing technology while lowering wind resistance to improve energy efficiency. In the future, as autonomous driving technology matures, rearview mirrors may be replaced by intelligent systems integrating multiple sensors, but their century-long evolution has always centered on the core goal of enhancing driving safety.
