Highlights Archives
Boating in Wisconsin a Longtime Tradition
With more than 15,000 lakes, 43,000 miles of rivers, and 650 miles of Great Lakes shoreline, it isn't too surprising that boating is a popular activity in Wisconsin. Long before boating became a recreational activity, however, boats were the only way to get to, from, and around Wisconsin.
Steamboats on the Mississippi connected Wisconsin to the Gulf of Mexico, while immigrants and goods from the East came on Great Lakes steamships. As other forms of transportation developed, first railroads and then automobiles, boating became more of a draw for tourists, particularly to resorts in northern Wisconsin beginning in the late 19th century.
Today, thousands of people motor across Wisconsin waters each year, a technological innovation designed and developed in Wisconsin nearly 100 years ago by Ole Evinrude. Born on a farm in Norway in 1877, Evinrude and his family immigrated to Cambridge, Wisconsin, in 1882. Abandoning school at a young age, Evinrude worked full time on his family's farm, tinkering with wooden boat parts and other machinery on the side. Moving around, Evinrude labored in factories all over the Midwest, including Chicago and Pittsburgh.
Returning to Wisconsin in 1900, Evinrude became head of the pattern shop at the Edward P. Allis Company in Milwaukee, and a few years later he formed a partnership, Clemick and Evinrude, to make custom gasoline engines. It was on a picnic with his soon-to-be wife Bess Cary in 1906 that the idea of an outboard motor was born. Picnicking at Lake Okauchee, Evinrude rowed across the lake in 90-degree heat to fetch some ice cream for Bess from a stand some two miles away. As the ice cream melted en route, Evinrude realized that if a gasoline engine could power an automobile, why not a boat?
In 1909, Evinrude created the first practical and reliable outboard motor. Bess became Evinrude's ad executive and wrote an advertisement that appeared in Milwaukee papers: "Don't Row! Throw the Oars Away! Use an Evinrude Motor." Although other inventors had experimented with the outboard motor, Evinrude's was unlike anything that had come before and was the first commercial success.
Evinrude's company, the Outboard Motor Company, remains the world leader in the outboard motor industry today, used by recreational boaters, fisherman, and even the military.
:: Posted July 7, 2006
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