How a century-old Montreal invention changed snow removal in the city

The challenge facing Montreal snow-removal crews this week is without precedent: two big storms back to back have left more than 70 centimetres of snow to clear.

It's the most in a four-day period on record, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada. A city official marvelled recently that the size of the snowbanks means the blower will need to pass two or even three times to fully clear one side of a street.

Still, the city crews are equipped with far more powerful machines than they were in the past.

Until the early 20th century, the city had to rely on horse-drawn plows, and often solely people and their shovels, to clear away the snow. In some cases, snow wasn't removed at all, as archival photos show. 

Smaller city streets and roads in rural areas were often closed to traffic through the winter months throughout the late 1920s and beyond, said Yves Laberge, a historian and sociologist who teaches at the University of Ottawa.

"It was a big issue back then, and it took days after a big snowstorm to return to a normal life," said Laberge, who has documented the history of snow removal in Quebec in the history journal Cap-aux-Diamants.

"In rural Quebec, there were places or villages that were very much isolated from the other ones."

From shovels and horses to the snowblower

From the middle of the 1800s to the turn of the century, residents in Montreal were responsible for clearing the sidewalk in front of their house — and often the road as well, according to the city.

That changed in 1905, when the city took charge. At that time, labourers were hired to shovel snow for 25 cents an hour. The snow was taken away in horse-drawn carts.

The first snowblower to clear the streets was purchased by the City of Montreal nearly 100 years ago, in 1928.

The inventor, Arthur Sicard, was born in 1876 in Saint-Léonard-de-Port-Maurice, which is now the Montreal borough of Saint-Léonard. At the time, it was mostly farmland, and Sicard was reportedly inspired by watching a grain thresher at work in a wheat field.

He wondered if a similar device could be used to clear snow, according to the entry on the snowblower in the Canadian Encyclopedia.

LISTEN | The history of snow clearing in the city: 

This is Montreal23:05How has snow clearing changed throughout Montreal's history?

When Montreal gets walloped with snow like it just did, it takes days to get the streets and sidewalks cleared. A century ago some streets just didn’t get cleared at all. From horse-drawn plows to the snowblowers, plows and trucks we use today, we’ll look at how snow clearing has evolved in Montreal. And we’ll hear from some Montreal researchers who are working to design the snow removal of the future using artificial intelligence.  

In 1925, he completed his first machine and called it "la déneigeuse et souffleuse à neige Sicard," which translates to "the Sicard snowplow and snowblower."

Attached to the front of a truck, the original design featured a scooper with an auger and a fan capable of blowing snow more than 25 metres.

The rise of the machine

Sicard sold his first snowblowers to the cities of Outrement and Montreal in 1927 for $13,000 each.

By then, Montreal had also begun using more motorized plows to clear snow from the streets.

The City of Montreal acquired two more snowblowers from Sicard's firm in 1938.

The machines included "a combined scraper, conveyor, blower, loading pipe with appropriate hydraulically driven mechanism," according to city archives.

One pamphlet from the Quebec government from the same year described the machine as an "insatiable monster" that could send snow 23 metres into the distance.

The design proved effective. Sicard "was hailed as a genius who changed the city's relationship with winter," the Canadian Encyclopedia entry said.

Following his death in 1946, Sicard Street was named after him, near the factory where the snowblowers were manufactured.

"His team who built the snow machine, they are in my view great Canadian heroes and they should be celebrated," Laberge said, pointing out that the invention was borne out of necessity as Montreal modernized.

"It's because you need something that you have to invent something."

Great expectations

The rise of the automobile, though, also put increased pressure on crews to clear the streets more quickly.

Decades later, in 1962, Montreal city director J.-V. Arpin remarked that the challenge for city workers had become immense, with more than one million people in the city centre each day, including 350,000 in automobiles.

"Motorists expect to drive to work in the morning on a bare pavement after a night storm," he said during a presentation.

These days, that challenge has multiplied, with roughly 800,000 personal vehicles registered on the island and an even greater expectation we should be able to get around quickly after rough weather.

On Wednesday, Mayor Valérie Plante, whose administration has faced criticism for its handling of the cleanup, urged patience.

"We want you to know that everyone is working extremely hard," she said. "We're making good progress, I'd like to say, in the midst of an historic storm."

Laberge, for his part, said it's important to remember how much we struggled in the face of snow storms of the past.

"Winters have always been an issue and we and Canadians have always been able to deal with snow storms, the ice, the cold, the winters," he said. "It's part of us."