It’s an unfortunate fact of life that most people take the technology around them for granted. Your smartphone puts the entire catalog of human knowledge at your fingertips, but millions use these devices to play “Angry Birds” or other time-wasting apps. This behavior extends to more than just digital technology – common things ranging from methods of transportation to the plumbing in your house don’t get the respect they deserve.
However, there’s one piece of technology that you can’t help but appreciate when snow starts falling in large numbers – the snow blower. If you’re lucky enough to have a state-of-the-art Husqvarna snow removal machine, then you should know how much of a difference a quality snow blower makes when you have to clear an entire yard by hand.
Like every other technology, though, someone had to be the first to recognize how much easier snow removal could be with some mechanical help.
How did people clear snow before they had machines to do it for them?Railway to heaven
While commercial snow blowers may only have broken onto the scene in the early 20th century, people have been fighting Mother Nature’s winter wrath for centuries. Before the Industrial Revolution, landowners would attach crude rollers to teams of horses. These contraptions would flatten moderate snow falls into tightly packed layers that people could glide across using cross-country skis. However, these rollers had to be pulled behind the horses, which meant that any amount of progress took a very long time. After being exposed to the elements for extended periods, these horses often had to be given breaks to avoid exhaustion or hypothermia.
Once railroads made their entrance onto the world stage in the late 19th century, intrepid inventors got their first chance to combine mechanical might with snow removal techniques. Enter the rotary snow plow – better known as the modern snow blower. It was during this time that rail lines were snaking their ways westward across North America, and when the railroads hit Western Canada’s intense snows, the workers needed a quick and easy way of clearing lines.
Engineers developed train car-sized snow removal machines that used the power of their engines to rotate a massive augur. The “Jull Centrifugal Snow Plough” is a great example of the earliest industrial snow removal machines. As these cars slid down the tracks, their own momentum would force snow through the housing and chute, where it would be thrown to the wayside.
“Arthur Sicard, a Montreal native, invented the first modern snow blower in 1925.”
The first machine
The invention of the automobile might have been a great boon for people looking to leave the cities and settle in suburbs, but it also represented a great leap in engine technology. No longer did powerful machines need to be driven by massive engine blocks – now, they could fit into much smaller packages.
This is one of the reasons that Arthur Sicard, a Montreal native, invented the first modern snow blower in 1925. Years earlier, Sicard had been working as a laborer on a Quebec wheat farm and noticed how grain threshers were able to pick the plant from the ground, separate the wheat and remove the chaff all in one motion. What was stopping him from inventing something like that for snow?
In 1925, Sicard fashioned a scooping attachment and impeller chute onto a truck chassis. While this early model didn’t have an augur to chop up impacted snow and ice, it was able to propel powder and slush up to 90 feet away.
Modern marvels
Though Sicard is the undisputed inventor of the first modern snow blower, he was never able to make it a commercial success in Canada. In fact, it wasn’t until the 1950s that companies in the U.S. noticed how popular the machine could be. Once prices for consumer snow blowers dropped below $200 in 1952, the stage was set for snow blowers to take over the U.S.
You can draw a clear line between Sicard and today’s snow blowers, but top-of-the-line machines like the Husqvarna ST227P have so many modern features that you probably can’t see the resemblance. With power steering, electric start and a remote chute deflector and rotator, even Sicard might not recognize his handiwork in these powerful snow blowers.