Bruce Nodwell, (May 12, 1914 – January 20, 2006) was a Canadian inventor who invented the Nodwell 110, a multi-purpose two-tracked vehicle capable of traversing a wide variety of adverse terrain, including sand, mud, muskeg, swamp, and snow.
In 1970, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, Canada's highest civilian honor, "for his contribution to the opening of the Canadian North through his inventions and development of various types of tracked vehicles". A mountain in Antarctica "Nodwell Peaks" and a lake in NWT bear his name.
Early life
William Bruce Nodwell was born on his father's homestead near Asquith, Saskatchewan, May 12, 1914. His unusual birth certificate read Section 22, Township 36, Range 9 west 3rd. As a youngster, his family lived in many small western Canadian towns, as his father was a grain elevator operator and trainer. They returned to Asquith, where his father ran a hardware store and later a Dodge car dealership in North Battleford. During this time, Bruce learned hands-on carpentry, electrical and mechanical machinery operations. Although he only took Grade 8 in school, he studied electrical apprenticeship by correspondence and became Saskatchewan's youngest registered electrician.
However, this was the time of the Great Depression in western Canada. Crops were drying out, prices for grain were low, farmers were being forced off the land, businesses were failing and there were next to no jobs. Bruce started doing odd jobs using his practical skills and hard work. He ran a two or three person contracting operation that took work wherever they could find it, which included all of southern Saskatchewan and Alberta. In 1936, he and his wife Phyllis settled in Calgary, Alberta where he and his brother, Jack, formed a contracting company known as Nodwell Brothers.
During the Depression and WWII years, not only were jobs hard to find, but so were materials. The government imposed a cost ceiling of $10,000 on all new buildings. This also applied to service stations, which made it very difficult to construct a building big enough to repair trucks and tractors or car dealerships. In order to construct a new building, another would have to be taken down, just to obtain nails, which then had to be straightened by hand.
Inventive genius
Bruce's inventiveness and problem solving skills soon became apparent. He developed and patented an automatic rewinding mechanism for gasoline pumps (CA 454365) and a pipe-wrapping machine for coating pipelines with tar paper in the field. Many problems related to construction work were solved by adapting other available equipment. Gradually the company continued to grow and diversify its activities including concrete bridges, trucking fleet, industrial camps and a machine shop known as Industrial Fabricators.
Over the years, Bruce filed nine patents in Canada.
Development of early tracked vehicles
In 1947, Imperial Oil made the Leduc No. 1 discovery in Alberta, and the economy began to rapidly expand. As the oil exploration moved northward from the Leduc region, the oil men soon encountered muskeg, a wet boggy swamp-like matter through which conventional equipment could not pass. Even WWII tracked equipment either could not handle the requirement or did not have sufficient load capacities.
Imperial Oil asked Bruce Nodwell to construct two vehicles they had designed to try to provide mobility over muskeg. These vehicles were unsuccessful, but Bruce had become aware of the need for large tracked vehicles. His first designs, that were to be either tracked or wheeled, were called North Kings and 16 were sold, but even they did not have enough mobility or durability. Bruce then concentrated on a vehicle design using soft tracks and single rows of wheels to support them.