Joseph-Armand Bombardier swore to God that no one would ever have to suffer his own terrible fate again, and he did not disappoint the Almighty. In the deepest winter of 1934, his two-year-old son died only because snow made the roads around his home village of Valcourt in southern Québec impassable and the boy could not be taken to the nearest hospital.
From then on, Bombardier did everything possible to develop a vehicle that could withstand the harshest of winters. He had the best prerequisites for this, because the son of the grocer from Valcourt showed an astonishing ingenuity at an early age, made his own toys as a child, built his own garage for his tinkering at the age of nineteen, and at the age of less than thirty he managed to build his largest Throw: a vehicle that drove on skids at the front and was driven by a large chain at the rear – and which made Bombardier an instant Canadian national hero.
Because with his snowmobile he robbed the horror of winter and not only freed his compatriots from their white prison, in which they had been locked up for months year after year. Now, however, snowmobiles transported believers to church, students to school, and the sick to the hospital. And when, a few years later, Bombardier also designed the recreational variant of its snow vehicle with the Ski-Doo, winter suddenly became fun – and the national hero became a national saint.
The inventor’s story is told to us at the Musée de l’ingéniosité J. Armand Bombardier in Valcourt using all the means of modern museum education, and in the most appropriate place: in the original brick garage, an early sister of Steve Jobs’ computer cradle in Silicon Valley , which was taken to the museum and now serves as a multimedia backdrop for elaborate animations. This also explains the strange name of the Ski-Doo, which should actually be called Ski-Dog. But the hook of the G mysteriously disappeared and no one bothered to look for it. Of course, the museum is an apotheosis of the snowmobile and shows the whole range from the first prototype to the current model, but that’s not all. Rather, the house lives up to its name and encourages visitors to be as imaginative and inventive as its namesake. There are workshops for every age group from kindergarten to university, and an exhibition portrays young inventors who gave the world the heated ski pole handle or a portable dialysis machine. And in a “Fabrication Laboratory”, which is part of a global network of more than a thousand such laboratories, everyone can turn their ideas into reality with professional help, be it a chess game from the 3D printer or Christmas decorations from the laser cutting machine.