By John Fry
Sixty winters ago, skiers were in despair. Not a flake of snow had fallen. Only thin frost coated grimy, dead-grassed ski trails. At Mohawk Mountain in Massachusetts' Berkshire Mountains, ski area operator Walt Schoenknecht wanted to offer his customers some kind of surface to ski on during the 1949 Christmas holiday week, so he spread 700 tons of crushed ice over his trails. Although his "snow" lasted only two weeks, Schoenknecht was able to sell thousands of lift tickets.
For ski area pioneers like Schoenknecht, lack of dependable snow presented a formidable barrier to creating a popular recreational sport after World War II. Crushed ice wasn't a long-term solution. There had to be another way to create snow when it didn't fall from the sky.
As it happened, Schoenknecht had three buddies not far away in Connecticut who were just exiting a business in even worse financial shape than his ski area. Engineers Arthur Hunt, Wayne Pierce and Dave Richey of Tey Manufacturing (T, E and Y were the last letters of their last names) were sitting on several thousand unsold pairs of a metal ski they'd been making. By 1950, Hunt recalled, "We were practically out of business." But not out of ingenuity.
On March 15, 1950, Pierce arrived at work with an idea in his head that he'd conceived overnight. He figured that if he propelled a drop of water through freezing air, it would turn into an hexagonal ice crystal. The three men quickly set about testing Pierce's hypothesis. Outside their defunct ski factory, they connected a 10-horsepower compressor by garden hose to a spray-gun nozzle that they'd been using to paint skis. Fortunately, the weather was cold. They put the apparatus inside a plywood box, mounted it on a stand, and turned on the juice.
Eureka! The mist flying out of the paint spray nozzle turned into crystals, just as Pierce had predicted. By morning the men had produced a 20-inch pile of "snow" in a 20-foot diameter circle.
The story—that men had produced snow with a machine—was picked up by the Wall Street Journal, Life Magazine and other newspapers. Radio newscaster Lowell Thomas, an enthusiastic skier, mentioned it on his evening broadcast.
The trio wasted no time in rushing their invention to Mohawk Mountain where their pal Schoenknecht—morose, his crushed ice having melted away—was still awaiting natural snow. Placing the new apparatus next to the lodge, the men switched on the power. Sure enough, the primitive snow gun blew snow all over Mohawk's main trail. It also produced a sound, inaudible to human ears, that caused dogs for miles around to howl through the world's first night of snowmaking at a ski area.
From that moment on, snowmaking grew rapidly. In the next dozen years, more than a hundred ski areas came to cover their slopes with machine-made snow, using ever bigger pipes, air compressors and pumps. Not only did it guarantee skiing, but snowmaking multiplied the number of days that people could ski. No longer was winter from Christmas week to Easter. Now it lasted from November to Easter and beyond. The ski season lengthened by 25 percent. The new snow from guns was denser and wetter and five times heavier than natural snow, so it stood up better to skier traffic and was less vulnerable to thawing.
While machine-made snow can't rival God-given deep powder, it will always be better than no snow at all—and for that, skiers can thank three obscure engineers whose failure at ski making led them to invent something far more valuable to the sport.
John Fry is the author of The Story of Modern Skiing.
John Fry
