# History of snowblowers



## bontai Joe (Sep 16, 2003)

I just learned today that the first snowblower was invented by a Canadian. Here is the story:

Who invented the snowblower?

Growing up on a dairy farm in St. Leonard de Port Maurice, Arthur Sicard was all too familiar with the problems of trying to get milk to market in the winter. Many was the time that the wagon would become stuck in a huge snow bank and the day's labor would be lost. It wasn't until Arthur was eighteen and working in the fields harvesting that he saw a new piece of farm machinery called the thresher which gathered the wheat into itself with rotating blades. He adapted this idea to the rural problem of road clearing and the result was the snowblower. A piece of equipment which in various forms has now become virtually indispensable for major snow removal tasks. 

However it didn't happen overnight. His first machine bogged down in larger drifts. As a result his friends and neighbors considered Sicard a crackpot and refused him moral or financial support. Undaunted Sicard left the farm for Montreal. He slowly climbed the economic ladder working first as a laborer in the construction industry and later as a road contractor. His dream was realized in the winter of 1925. People of Montreal were astonished to see a strange-looking truck lumbering down the roadway. It had a conventional cab in the front with an auxiliary motor where the body of the truck is located. In place of bumpers it had two rotating blades with a long ejection shoot behind which spewed out the snow. The road the truck had passed over was smooth and clear. 

Slowly his idea caught on. The Montreal based inventor sold his first, "Sicard Snow Remover Snowblower" as it was called, to the nearby town of Outremont, in 1927. Snow blowers were purchased by municipalities in Quebec, and then by the Department of Transportation in Ottawa. Eventually his snow blowers were clearing snow slides in the Rocky Mountains, airports in Switzerland and roads throughout the world. 

Arthur Sicard was born in Saint-Léonard-de-Port-Maurice, Quebec on December 17, 1876. He died on September 13, 1946. 

The Toro website makes the Claim that Toro introduced the first snowthrower in 1951. This of course is in the context of domestic walk-behind units.


I got this from: 
http://home.gwi.net/~spectrum/snowhistory.html

This site has some real interesting stuff on early consumer snowblowers. It is worth checking out.


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## aegt5000 (Feb 22, 2004)

Thanks Joe,

That was a great link.:thumbsup:


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