In a garage in Valcourt, Joseph-Armand Bombardier built a machine for the Quebec winter

On New Year’s Eve 1922, in the village of Valcourt, Quebec, Alfred Bombardier watched his eldest son drive a strange machine across the snow. Joseph-Armand, 15, had fixed an old Ford Model T engine to a pair of wooden sledges and put a propeller on the back. The Canadian Encyclopedia says it ran for more than a kilometre (about two-thirds of a mile). His father, worried about the open propeller, had it taken apart.

It was the first of Bombardier’s snow machines. The one that made his name arrived 15 years later.

A winter that shut villages in

Snow was the problem he kept coming back to. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes the need for effective winter transport in rural communities; the Bombardier museum writes of the isolation of the countryside in winter.

Bombardier, born on 16 April 1907, was a mechanic first. The Museum of Ingenuity J. Armand Bombardier, in Valcourt, says he was apprenticed at a garage in South Stukely at 17 and came home in 1926 to open his own, with a loan from his father that he repaid by 1929. The National Inventors Hall of Fame calls it a machine shop. Either way, it was where he spent his winters experimenting.

The son, and what the story leaves out

In January 1934 Bombardier’s two-year-old son, Yvon, died of peritonitis. The Canadian Encyclopedia says the family could not reach the hospital in time, and that the loss showed how badly rural places needed winter transport. The Bombardier museum puts it more strongly: “Urged on by the pain of his loss, Joseph-Armand increases his efforts” against that isolation.

The death is often told as the moment the snowmobile was born. The sources do not quite say that. He had been building snow vehicles for a dozen years by then. What the museum and the encyclopedia both describe is a man who was already at work and who pushed harder afterwards.

A sprocket and a track

By 1935, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia and the Ingenium museum in Ottawa, Bombardier had a vehicle running on caterpillar tracks and steered by skis at the front. The part that mattered was the drive: a sprocket wheel turning a track. The Canadian Museum of History describes the result as a winter vehicle easy to manoeuvre in all snow conditions.

The museum says he asked Ottawa for a patent in December 1936 (its own patent list gives the application date as 21 December, its narrative as the 19th). Canadian patent 367104 was granted on 29 June 1937.

The first production machine was the B7, an enclosed vehicle with seven seats. The museum says the first seven were built in the winter of 1936 to 1937; the encyclopedia and the Canadian Museum of History date the B7 to 1937. By 1939, Ingenium says, Bombardier had orders for 100. The buyers were the people a winter cut off from their work: country doctors, ambulance drivers, telephone and power companies, foresters and the post office. The 1939 B7 in Ingenium’s collection carried rural mail.

War, the B12 and a bigger company

L’Auto-Neige Bombardier Limitée was formed in July 1942, the museum says, the same year he patented the larger, 12-seat B12. The Second World War brought orders for tracked military vehicles: more than 1,900 were made between 1942 and 1946. From 1942 to 1951 the company built 2,817 B12s.

The Ski-Doo

The machine most people now picture came last. At the end of 1958, the museum says, Bombardier had a prototype of something much smaller: a single track behind steerable skis, which the Canadian Encyclopedia compares to a motorcycle. His son Germain designed the track.

In 1959 Bombardier took one to Father Maurice Ouimet, a missionary at Lansdowne House in northern Ontario, and gave it to him. The National Inventors Hall of Fame says the machine was “originally called the Ski-Dog” before it went into production as the Ski-Doo late that year. A Parks Canada plaque in Valcourt gives 1960 as the year the Ski-Doo was patented.

The museum’s figures show what happened next: 225 sold in the first season, then 250, then 1,200, then 2,500, then 8,352 in the winter of 1963 to 1964. Bombardier did not see the boom. He died on 18 February 1964, aged 56.

Where the accounts differ

The sources agree on the patent of 29 June 1937 and the dates of his life. They differ on smaller things: whether he had a garage or a machine shop in 1926, whether the B7 dates from the winter of 1936 or 1937, and whether the Ski-Doo belongs to 1958, 1959 or 1960, depending on whether you count the prototype, the first delivery or the patent. The Ski-Dog name comes from the Hall of Fame; the museum’s own history does not mention it.

For another inventor who spent decades on one problem, read how John Harrison’s H4 found longitude. For an everyday object with a famous origin story, see Percy Shaw and the cat’s eye.