Clever inventions that came out of the cold

A year later, Olympic skating star Sonja Henie's traveling ice show visited Zamboni's rink. She saw his machine in action and ordered one on the spot. He built it on the body of an Army jeep left over from World War II. Today, you can expect to find at least one Zamboni at every indoor ice-skating rink.

One machine can now shave, wash, resurface, and squeegee the ice all at the same time. What used to take an hour and a crew of three or four now takes one worker a matter of minutes.

Zamboni's inventiveness didn't stop there. He also created a machine to suck up water from AstroTurf used in sports stadiums. Another machine of his can remove the painted lines from AstroTurf, so the same field can be used for many sports.

Skiing is fun. But would you climb a mountain all day just to zip right back down?

That's what early downhill skiers had to do. They would trudge up a mountain with their skis over their shoulders or on their feet. Skiers strapped pieces of seal skin to the bottom on their skis to keep from sliding backward down the mountain. (The slick fur let them slide the ski forward, but the hairs would dig into the snow when the ski moved backward, giving the skier a grip on the snow.)

Then, in 1933, Wallace "Bunny" Bertram installed a long loop of continuously moving rope up a hill on a farm in Woodstock, Vt. The rope was powered by a Model-T Ford automobile engine. "Tow ropes" had previously been installed in Canada (1933) and Zurich, Switzerland (1932), but this was its first appearance in the United States.

Skiers grabbed onto the rope and were pulled up the mountain on their skis. It was tiring for skiers and tough on mittens, but now American skiers could enjoy many more runs down a mountain in a single day.

A few years later, the rope was replaced by an overhead cable. Now skiers could lean against a metal hook that pushed them up the mountain instead of their being pulled by a rope.

In 1936 came the first chairlift, in which skiers sat suspended in the air. (See illustration above.) An engineer named James Curran got the idea for the chairlift while looking at a cable used to unload bananas from freighter ships. The new chairlift could carry about 450 skiers an hour up a mountain.

Growing up on a dairy farm in Quebec, Ontario, in Canada, Arthur Sicard saw just how inconvenient snow-covered roads could be. His family couldn't get milk to market when deep snow made the roads impassible. Snowplows were available, but was there a better way?

As a teenager, Arthur also saw a machine called a thresher being used to harvest wheat. The thresher used rotating blades. He wondered if a similar machine could clear snow from country roads. He set out to build such a contraption. To make one that worked took him three decades.

It wasn't until the winter of 1925 that Mr. Sicard developed a snowblower that worked. That year, residents of Montreal saw a strange four-wheel-drive truck rumbling through the streets of the city.

That first snowblower had three sections: the truck chassis, two adjustable chutes, and a motor to run it. In place of its front bumper were two rotating blades in a housing with a scoop in front. The driver could clear and toss snow into the back of the truck or throw it more than 90 feet away. Instead of pushing the snow aside, the way plows did, the new machine could cart it off or throw it well out of the way.

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