Long before paved highways reached the villages of rural Quebec, the deep snows of winter cut many small communities off from the outside world for months at a time. Into this landscape was born Joseph-Armand Bombardier, a self-taught mechanic from the town of Valcourt, and from boyhood he was preoccupied with engines. Certain accounts relate that he assembled his first crude snow machine, a sled driven by an aircraft propeller, while still in his teens. His determination to conquer the winter roads hardened after a family tragedy: in the mid-1930s his young son died of an illness because a blizzard had rendered the route to the nearest hospital impassable.

The most consequential feature of Bombardier's design was undoubtedly the mechanism that propelled it. Rather than wheels, which sank helplessly into powder, he devised a continuous track of rubber and steel that wrapped around a toothed driving wheel, or sprocket. This arrangement distributed the vehicle's weight across a broad surface so that the machine rode over loose snow instead of plunging through it. He secured a patent for the sprocket-and-track system in 1937. Though the running gear was comparatively light, it could haul a substantial load without faltering.