An Evinrude Century

By Thomas Ludens

One hot August day in 1906, Ole Evinrude and his fiancée Bess Cary went on a romantic picnic on an island in the middle of a Wisconsin lake. By the time they had rowed out to the island, they were parched and hot.

“Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a dish of ice cream!” sighed Bess.







In the next moment, Ole was back in the rowboat heading toward the mainland for that ice cream, a round-trip row of five miles in the blistering sun. The oars creaked in the locks, Ole’s back bent in labor and sweat poured down his face. At the end of a mile, he dropped the oars to rest a minute and thought, Gosh, why doesn’t somebody invent a motor for these boats?

As he rowed on in the heat, the idea kept returning to him. He pictured a portable motor, light in weight and simple to operate, a motor that could be attached to a rowboat and handled by anybody. “Somebody ought to invent one,” grunted Ole. “Maybe someday I will.”

And so it was, with melting ice cream as the impetus, that Ole built the first detachable row boat motor—and the first Evinrude Outboard—a few years later. In April of 1909, Ole and his future brothers-in-law, the Cary brothers, took their invention on its first test run.

At this point, the temptation is to say, “And the rest was history.” But that would gloss over a hundred years of ups and downs, change and adaptation, improvement and growth that led to the engines we know today.

Evinrude made the transition from small family company to international brand in 1911, when Bess began working on an international business plan to get through slow winter sales. Within days of meeting with a large export firm, the Evinrude Motor Company received an order for 1,000 motors.

By 1913 record sales were reported, but the next year Ole sold his share in the business to care for his ailing wife. Sales declined but Bess’s health improved, and in 1920 she and her husband got back in the outboard business. They formed Elto (Evinrude Light Twin Outboard) Outboard Motor Company, unveiled the Elto Ruddertwin and within two years were selling 3,500 motors a year.

The Elto name didn’t last long, and by the mid-’30s it was Evinrude all the way. World War II defense contracts led to a boost in production. By 1947, the company produced 262,000 engines annually, outpacing the 14 other U.S. outboard makers combined. Evinrude was off.

A huge new plant opened in Milwaukee in 1956, and a V-type four-cylinder engine was developed two years later. The new outboards had jumped 11 horsepower from those produced just 15 years before. The ’60s saw the introduction of the automatic choke, which allowed instant starting whether the engine was hot or cold, and the industry’s first push-button shifting, which made gear shifting smoother and easier. During the ’70s, Evinrude amped up their engines to 135 horsepower—power fit for James Bond, who set a world record by jumping 100 feet over Sheriff J.W. Pepper’s police vehicle during a boat chase in Live and Let Die.

The first use of a microcomputer in an outboard came in 1982 from Evinrude. The first 300-horsepower V-8 engine appeared in 1984. The ’90s saw improved efficiency, durability and corrosion resistance, as well as direct fuel-injection technology.

Then, on December 21, 2000, Evinrude hit a wall. Decreased sales and the difficulty of complying with new environmental requirements forced the company’s hand: operations were ceased and bankruptcy was declared. But the end of Evinrude turned out to be only a brief hiatus: within a year, Bombardier had acquired the brand and engines were rolling off the assembly line again.

The 21st century has seen Evinrude return to its innovative origins. E-Tec technology was introduced in 2003, and it has driven the company’s outboards ever since. The result has been ever stronger, efficient and environmentally-friendly engines. Evidence of the turnaround was everywhere, but it was perhaps no more apparent than in the Clean Air Excellence Award that the EPA gave the company for the environmental leadership represented by E-Tec.

Today, the company Ole Evinrude started is still around and still improving the ease and speed with which we cross the water. In 2009, to celebrate a century of building outboards, Evinrude is introducing big new 250- and 300-horsepower engines for those who want to push the limits. For those who want lots of power in a smaller package, Evinrude is expanding its mid-100-horsepower line. And for those who want something light and tough, Evinrude is offering 13 engines in the 25- to 30-horsepower range.

It may be an unlikely mother for Ole Evinrude’s ingenious invention, but a dish of melting ice cream more than one hundred years ago means that today we don’t have to row our way across our local lake. We can speed across the water with our hand resting on an Evinrude rudder, and we can get home before the cooler ice has time to melt.

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