Ole Evinrude: A Melting Dish of Ice Cream and the First Practical Outboard

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Ole Evinrude was born in Norway in 1877. When his family emigrated in the early 1880s they took the name of the Evinrude farm where his mother was born and settled on a farm near Lake Ripley in Cambridge, Wisconsin. At 16 he left for Madison to teach himself engineering in machinery shops, then worked as an itinerant machinist in Milwaukee engine shops, Pittsburgh steel mills and Chicago plants. By 1900 he had co-founded a custom engine firm. The founding story has him rowing across a Wisconsin lake on a hot summer day to bring ice cream to his girlfriend Bess before it melted, and deciding that an engine should do the rowing.

His 1907 outboard was built of steel and brass, started by cranking a heavy flywheel and used a two-stroke design, trading the nuisance of mixing oil into the fuel for a far lighter, simpler engine with no valve train. In 1909 he founded the Evinrude Motor Company in Milwaukee, which had 300 employees by 1912. In 1913 he sold the company to care for Bess, who had become seriously ill. Once her health stabilized in 1919 he launched Elto, the Evinrude Light Twin Outboard, a lighter aluminum twin that competed with Johnson and with his own former company, and he later acquired rivals in a combination that became the Outboard Marine Corporation. Bess died in 1933 at 48 and Ole died the next year at 57.

• The two-stroke engine fires on every downstroke, with the piston uncovering ports in the cylinder wall instead of using valves.
• A heavy flywheel smoothed out the jerky pulses of the single cylinder.
• He let two Milwaukee teenagers obsessed with motorized bicycles use his precision tools, one of them Arthur Davidson.
• Elto's twin cylinders and aluminum alloys made it lighter and smoother than his original design.
• His son Ralph Evinrude became chairman, and the Evinrude name survives under Bombardier Recreational Products.