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The Inventor of the Snowmobile Joseph-Armand Bombardier was born in Valcourt, Quebec, on April 16, 1907. As a teenager, he was fascinated with mechanical things, and he had a natural gift for working on machinery. He wanted to develop a machine that could travel across both snow and muskeg. Bombardier was one of the first inventors to develop such a machine. His very first 'snowmobile', built in 1923, was powered by the engine from a Ford Model T.  Bombardier spent many years trying to perfect the all-purpose snow machine. Another of his early attempts in 1929 was the 'snow car'; you can see Bombardier (still a young man) in the picture.  By 1930 he had built a successful machine that was driven by tracks. It was steered by braking one track or the other, as in the tractors of the time. In 1937 he made his first major breakthrough, building a vehicle with steerable skis in front of a set of tracks. In 1942, Bombardier established a company to manufacture his tracked vehicles. By 1947 Bomardier had also designed a 12-passenger enclosed snowmachine for the military, which was later adopted for use by the Canadian police, mining and oil exploration companies, and even a few ski-hill operators. In 1958, the Ski-Doo was introduced. Bombardier's development of this machine that we know today as a "snowmobile" was instrumental in changing lifestyles of people everywhere that gets snow. Single-handedly, this new machine created an entirely new winter industry that was soon to be worth billions of dollars. The size and low price of this new "snowmobile" made it an overnight success. Within 10 years, even dog-teams in northern villages were being replaced by Skidoos. Every family that lived in winter areas had to have one! Bombardier died at Sherbrooke, Quebec on February 18, 1964. His company, though, has continued to grow. With plants in Quebec, Austria, Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, Finald, Mexico, Germany, the Czech Republic, Switzerland and the United States, the company now has 53,000 employees and had sales in January 1999 of $11.6 billion. |