The Snowblower

 

The Light Bulb

Where else but Quebec, Canada could have been the birth place of the Snowblower? Although a New Brunswick man, Robert Carr Harris patented the “Railway Screw Snow Excavator” in 1870, the invention was never really adopted. There are also several other ideas that never made it to realization, including one by a Toronto Dentist, J.W. Elliot, patented in 1869 but never built. And so it is that Arthur Sicard, a farmer’s son from the island of Montreal in Quebec, is credited with inventing the Snowblower.

 

Arthur Sicard was born in Saint-Léonard-de-Port-Maurice, (now know simply as Saint-Leonard) Quebec on December 17, 1876. He worked on his father’s dairy farm and regularly made deliveries of eggs, milk and other produce to the local market and inhabitants. In winter the road conditions were very difficult because of the snowfall making it hard to get his produce to market. Brought about by frustration, Arthur Sicard came up with an idea for a machine that would blow away the snow, clearing the roads.

 

His design was based on a concept he first described in 1894 at age 18, but popular belief has it that he got his idea from a then new invented farm machine called a thresher. If such a machine could gather grain, then maybe he could use it to clear snow. By 1925, having been scoffed at by friends and family, Arthur had moved to Montreal where to the amazement of the people of that city, he demonstrated his first working prototype, the "Sicard Snow Remover Snowblower".

 

Arthur founded Sicard Industries in Sainte-Thérèse, Quebec and in 1927 he sold his first production vehicles to the nearby town of Outremont, now a borough of Montreal. Arthur Sicard died on September 13, 1946.

 

So who came up with the devices we use to clear out driveways? Well that is claimed by Toro, who introduced their snow thrower in 1951. But it still used the same concepts conceived by Sicard 4 decades earlier.

 

©2009 Anthony Gussin