Transcript
Two winners
On the twelfth of February, 1883, twenty-one people set off down a Swiss public road on wooden sleds.
The course ran for about four kilometres, from Davos towards Klosters. Twelve of the racers were Swiss. The rest had come from around half a dozen countries. They went one at a time, each against the clock, steering with their feet and trying not to meet anything coming the other way.
Nine minutes and fifteen seconds after the first start, the race had two winners.
One was Peter Minsch, a postman from Klosters. He knew the road because it was part of his world. The other was George Robertson, an Australian visitor and former first-class cricketer. He knew fast pitches rather better than icy mountain roads.
The referee was John Addington Symonds, an English writer who had moved to Davos because tuberculosis had made ordinary life at lower altitude dangerous.
A Swiss postman and an Australian cricketer had found exactly the same way down a mountain, while a seriously ill historian kept the time.
There was no bobsleigh. No luge. No skeleton.
Not yet.
This is Slidensa — SLY-den-sa — stories of ice, gravity and speed.
The wrong question
The race in Davos is often placed at the beginning of all three sliding sports. But it did not belong to any one of them. It came before the names had settled; before athletes committed to sitting up, lying feet-first or diving head-first; before a crew climbed into a machine with steering ropes and a brake.
The sleds were recognisably sleds. The sport was still undecided.
And that makes the usual question difficult.
Who invented bobsleigh?
There ought to be a simple answer. The most repeated version has a name, a place and three unforgettable objects. A visitor called Wilson Smith joins two small sleds with a plank and rides from St. Moritz towards Celerina. According to one version, he uses a garden rake as a brake.
It is a perfect origin story.
It is also only one of them.
Davos has another American, another joined sled and another claim. St. Moritz has a British major and a Swiss blacksmith. The dates move. The nationalities change. Machines appear before the machine that is supposed to be first.
So this is not really a search for one inventor.
It is the story of how a race became a machine, how the machine became a sport, and how the sport became too fast for the road that created it.
The track everyone already owned
Before sledding became a leisure industry, a sled was transport. Across the Alps it moved hay, wood, goods and people through winters that stopped wheeled vehicles. The technology did not need inventing for tourists. It was already there, in farms and workshops and village streets.
The tourists changed its purpose.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Davos was becoming a destination for people with damaged lungs. The air was cold, dry and high. Doctors sent patients there to recover, or at least to live somewhere breathing felt more possible.
They arrived with time.
By December 1879, the local spa association had built a small toboggan run below the Kurhaus, with separate ways up and down. That detail tells you the problem. Before the separate lanes, guests slid from the nearby slopes towards the promenade and simply hoped the promenade would be empty when they arrived.
The longer attraction was the snow-covered post road towards Klosters. It was not a sporting facility. It was a road: broad enough to be tempting, steep enough to be fast, and connected to somewhere people actually needed to go.
In January 1882, Davos held a local race. It worked well enough that the next winter the idea became international.
Five days before the race, the Davos Toboggan Club was formed. Symonds became its president. This was not an idle title handed to a famous visitor. Symonds had made Davos his home. He took part in the town’s civic life, supported local institutions and wrote much of his work there.
The image of a dying poet judging a race is almost too neat. The truth is more interesting. Symonds had been seriously ill. Davos gave him back enough health to build a life. He would live another ten years after the race and complete books on the Renaissance, Michelangelo and Walt Whitman. On that February day, he was not waiting for death. He was organising winter sport.
The sled beneath the racers was almost aggressively simple: two wooden runners, iron strips beneath them, a few slats across the top, and a rope for pulling it back uphill. The type became known as the Davos sledge. The name is still burned into the middle slat of versions sold today.
To turn, a rider put a foot into the snow beside the inside runner. To stop, they used both feet. Every correction threw away speed. The fastest descent was therefore a negotiation between courage and the post road’s opinion of where you ought to go.
The 1883 result sounds invented because every person in it seems written for a part.
It also brought together two Davoses that depended on one another without being equal.
There was the Davos of visitors: patients with money and time, writers and former athletes sent uphill by their doctors, people who could turn a useful local object into an afternoon’s competition. And there was the Davos of the people who kept the place working: postmen, carpenters, hotel staff, road crews and farmers who had used runners on snow long before anyone awarded a cup for it.
The international race needed both. Visitors supplied the club structure, the publicity and many of the entrants. Local knowledge supplied the road, the sleds and the understanding of what winter permitted. Even the field was designed to mix them. Nearby districts were invited to send Swiss riders to compete with the foreign guests.
That did not erase the social distance between them. It placed the distance on a stopwatch.
Minsch, the local postman, belongs to the practical world the sled came from. Robertson, the Australian, belongs to the international resort that was forming around it. One source calls Robertson a student. In fact, he was about forty. He had played cricket for Oxford and Victoria, helped run his family’s grazing estate, and spent long periods travelling because his own health was poor.
The race put the local and the visitor on level terms. Nine minutes, fifteen seconds each.
That dead heat was not the birth of bobsleigh. It did something more basic. It proved that a road journey could be turned into a timed sporting argument.
And once one Alpine town had an argument, another town wanted to answer it.
St. Moritz answers back
Davos and St. Moritz are roughly sixty kilometres apart as the crow flies, but their early winter cultures were close enough to compete.
Visitors in St. Moritz were already racing small delivery sleds through village streets. That was exciting for the visitors and less useful for anyone trying to cross the street.
In 1884, riders associated with St. Moritz went to race at Davos. Davos took most of the best places. Peter Minsch won again.
The response was not to practise harder on the same road. It was to build a different kind of road.
Guests at the Kulm Hotel formed an Outdoor Amusements Committee. Among them was Major William Henry Bulpett, a British officer who would keep reappearing whenever early sliding sport needed somebody to turn enthusiasm into timber, steel or ice.
The committee wanted a course that could answer the Davos race and return its hospitality. There was no suitable road, so they marked a route from near the Kulm Hotel down past the hamlet of Cresta towards Celerina.
The work took weeks. The line was tramped into the snow. Banks were built at the corners. Water was poured onto them and left to freeze, creating hard walls that held a sled on a faster path than the open post road could allow.
This was the Cresta Run.
On the sixteenth of February, 1885, St. Moritz invited Davos to race on the new course. Ten riders represented each town.
Davos won.
St. Moritz had supplied the labour, the ice and the home advantage. Davos took the result. The losing town reportedly compensated with a celebration in the Kulm’s Sunny Bar grand enough to become part of the story too.
The important result was the run itself. A public road asks a rider to adapt to the landscape. A built course allows the landscape to be adapted to the rider. The banks could be shaped, watered and repaired. Corners could acquire names. Speed could be designed.
But the Cresta was still a course for one person on one small sled.
The next transformation came when riders began changing both the posture and the machine.
At the 1887 Grand National, a rider remembered only as Mr Cornish went down head-first. He finished fourteenth.
It was not a convincing result. It was a convincing idea.
Within a few seasons, head-first riding dominated the Cresta. At about the same time, an American called L. P. Child introduced a low North American-style sled with metal runners, known as an “America.” It was faster and closer to the ice than the upright Davos sledge.
The athletes had lowered themselves. The sled had lowered itself. The remaining question was whether one sled was enough.
The first first bobsleigh
In the winter of 1888 to 1889, an American visitor named Stephen Whitney appeared at Davos with a machine he called Maud S.
It consisted of two low America sleds, one behind the other, connected by a long board. The front unit could move in relation to the rear. That made the whole thing steerable in a new way. Instead of dragging a boot through the snow to force a turn, a rider could point the front sled and ask the back to follow.
The idea may have come from North American timber work. Long logs could be carried over snow with a small sled beneath each end. A practical system for moving wood became a recreational system for moving people.
Whitney brought the machine to trials for the international race and went fastest.
Then the committee refused to let him race it.
The event was restricted to traditional Swiss toboggans. An earlier American sled had already caused enough argument. Whitney’s coupled machine was not an improvement within the category. It threatened the category itself.
So Whitney dismantled it.
He set the rear section aside, lay head-first on the front sled and won by a wide margin anyway.
This is a lovely early example of a rule trying to preserve fairness and accidentally helping invent a different sport. The machine that could have become a bob was excluded; the half that remained became part of the head-first tradition we now associate with skeleton.
Davos records Whitney’s machine as an important beginning of bobsleigh. The Swiss Historical Dictionary calls his two-part sled steerable. A modern history describes Maud S as a forerunner of the bob.
And none of that is Wilson Smith, the man usually named as the inventor.
Smith’s story takes place at almost the same time, farther down the Engadin. According to Olympedia, he was an American with relatives in Britain. Other accounts call him English. The year is 1888, or 1889, or 1890, depending on which history you open.
Smith wanted to travel from St. Moritz to Celerina without walking. He joined two small sleds with a board and made space for several people. Later versions give him a garden rake for a brake.
Perhaps he did. A rake is a plausible solution when the workshop is closed and the hill is open. It is also exactly the detail a good origin story acquires as it is retold.
The problem is not that Smith’s machine is impossible. It is that the surviving accounts agree more confidently on the objects than on the person, the date or his connection to the other experiments happening nearby.
Was Whitney first? Was Smith? Did Smith see a machine from Davos? Did Bulpett? Did several visitors independently notice that two small sleds could carry a long platform?
There is no starting photograph with everyone labelled. There is no patent that settles the argument. Early histories were written after the sport already wanted a birthday.
So the first twist is that bobsleigh has at least two first bobsleighs.
The second is that neither may be the first machine we would recognise as one.
The blacksmith
William Bulpett had helped create the Cresta Run. He had watched the low American sleds arrive. He had seen steerable, coupled machines in Davos. And in St. Moritz he had access to a man who could turn an improvised idea into a repeatable object.
Christian Mathis was a local blacksmith and farrier. His daily work belonged to the same transport system the new sport kept disrupting: horses, runners, metal, roads and winter repairs.
In 1888, Bulpett commissioned Mathis to make a low steel-framed sled. With its wooden sides removed, it looked like the bones of a machine. That exposed frame is one explanation for the name “skeleton.”
A year later, Bulpett asked Mathis for something larger.
Mathis placed two low sleds in line beneath a frame and seating platform. The front assembly could be turned with ropes. Five people could sit upright on cushions. The rear rider operated the brake.
The result was heavier, faster and far more imposing than a plank laid across two children’s sleds. People in St. Moritz called it a “diabolical-looking steed.” A club record described its weight and powerful steering as making it faster than any single sled.
It also turned sledding into a division of labour.
The pilot could not brake. The brakeman could not see the approaching corner as clearly as the pilot. The people between them added weight and shared the consequences, but had little direct control once the run began. A mistake at the front travelled through the whole crew before the man at the rear could do anything about it.
The machine therefore demanded trust as much as technique. It also made local craft impossible to ignore. Visitors could commission and race the new sleds, but blacksmiths shaped the steel, carpenters made the platforms, builders maintained the ice, and horse teams returned everything uphill. The sport’s public mythology collected English and American names. Its physical survival depended on Swiss hands that appeared less often in the minutes.
This is why the phrase “invented the bobsleigh” keeps changing meaning.
Smith or Whitney may have demonstrated the coupled principle. Bulpett saw the sporting possibility. Mathis engineered a purpose-built crew machine. The riders then discovered how to operate it.
Each stage has a plausible claim to invention.
The early crews sat one behind another. The pilot steered from the front. The brakeman worked at the back. Everyone between them had a less precise job, so they tried to help by moving.
On the straights, crews rocked backwards and forwards together because they believed the motion would make the sled accelerate. This “bobbing” is the accepted explanation for the name bobsleigh.
It did not make the sled faster.
The useless technique disappeared. The name survived.
There is something wonderfully appropriate about that. The first bob was not a finished invention revealed all at once. It was a collection of ideas, some effective, some mistaken, moving downhill quickly enough that people had to work out which was which.
The sport has to invent itself
By the middle of the 1890s, bobsleigh riders formed a section within the St. Moritz Tobogganing Club. But the relationship between the single-sled Cresta riders and the crews with their heavier machines was not easy.
They disagreed over access to the run. They disagreed over what counted as proper sliding. One group saw itself preserving a demanding individual tradition. The other arrived with long machines, multiple passengers and an appetite for any pass road that pointed downhill.
On the twenty-first of December, 1897, the bobbers formed their own club. It is now regarded as the world’s oldest bobsleigh club.
The surviving record says the meeting was probably held at the Kulm Hotel, but even that cannot be confirmed. The first authentic club document begins with seven rules.
Those rules are more revealing than any heroic invention story.
The club wanted to hold races on the Cresta and on mountain roads. It wanted people stationed at dangerous corners to warn bobsleighs and horse-drawn sleighs about each other. It wanted instruction leaflets printed for the horse-sleigh drivers. And it wanted a good relationship with the authorities, which is what a club writes down when its members are moving very quickly through places the authorities still consider roads.
Then there was the committee.
It had five members. The rules required that two be women.
The first named committee included Mrs Shepley and Miss M. Cousins, alongside H. W. Topham, E. Cremers and F. J. Watson. Women were not added to the club’s story by a later reform. They were written into its first rules.
This did not make Victorian sport equal. Wealth, nationality and the hotel social world still decided who could take part. But it does make the simplified version—men invent bobsleigh, women arrive a century later—plainly wrong.
Early bobsleigh was social partly because the machine required company. A single Cresta rider could treat danger as a private contest. A five-seat bob needed a pilot, a brake operator and passengers willing to trust both. It offered speed without requiring every rider to control a sled alone. The club’s own history called it a kind of parlour game in which women could fully participate.
The phrase sounds patronising now. The races themselves were real.
In January 1898, the new club held its first bobsleigh race on the road towards Celerina. The surviving summary is three sled names long.
Alligator won.
Australia crashed.
Atlanta crashed.
That is two crashes among the three machines remembered by name.
The same winter, a sled called Mildred, piloted by Madame Little, won what the Cresta and Bob Museum describes as probably the first women’s bobsleigh race. The rules for another early event required five-person crews to include two women.
Mixed and all-women crews were not a novelty confined to one afternoon. They remained part of the early culture into the twentieth century. Only later did international competition harden around men’s events and write many of those women out of the short version of the sport’s past.
These races were competition, but they were also theatre.
There was prize money. Spectators placed bets. Hotel parties framed the day, and owning or sponsoring a distinctive sled was a way to be seen. Machines had names because they had identities: Mildred, Alligator, Australia, Atlanta. A bobsleigh was sporting equipment, transport, social invitation and expensive spectacle at once.
That helps explain why the sport grew so quickly among the resort’s wealthy visitors. A five-person machine multiplied participation. It also multiplied cost. A faster sled encouraged another builder, another material and another claim of mechanical advantage. Before bobsleigh became an international technology contest, the basic incentive was already present on the hotel road: somebody nearby had a machine you wanted to beat.
The club had now solved one problem. It had rules, membership, races and a committee.
It still did not have a track of its own.
Thirteen races and two telephones
The first bobs raced on the snow-covered cantonal road between St. Moritz and Celerina. There were bends, traffic and people who had not paid ten francs to join a new club.
The rules tried to manage the conflict. Lookouts could warn crews about horse-drawn sleighs. Leaflets could warn the drivers. But a lookout cannot create another road.
In the winter of 1900 to 1901, the club held thirteen bobsleigh races on the route. Reports of collisions with pedestrians and horse traffic accumulated. A local newspaper asked the obvious question: when would the bobbers finally have a course exclusively for bobs?
Even the timing system reveals how the sport was caught between eras.
In March 1898, there was a telephone in a cabin at the start and another at the finish. When a bob crossed the line, the finish telephoned the start. The clock was kept at the top.
The machine went down the mountain. The information came back up a wire.
It is a tiny technological detail, but it changes the picture. This was not a group of people casually throwing wooden sleds down a hill. They were already building systems: communications, timing, corner control, traffic management, membership and equipment rules.
The sled itself was changing just as quickly.
The Mathis bob used ropes to turn its front assembly. In 1903, the Neuchâtel engineer Adolphe Louis Roessinger introduced a design steered by a wheel, borrowing the logic of the new motor car. The Bachmann brothers later acquired the patent. Other builders, including August Hartkopf and Carl Feierabend, developed iron bobs with rope steering.
There was no single march from primitive to modern. Designers tried wheels, rods and ropes. They tried wood and steel. Some crews sat upright. Later, crews lay forward to reduce their area in the air. An idea could look more advanced and still lose to an older mechanism that gave the pilot better feel.
Modern bobsleigh returned decisively to steering rings and ropes. The pilot pulls one side to turn the front runners. The steering wheel belongs to a road vehicle; the ropes survived in the ice machine.
The sport had become an engineering argument. The public road was no longer a reasonable place to conduct it.
Build the road again
In February 1903, the Engadiner Post reported that the question of a special bobsleigh run seemed close to a solution.
The Badrutt family, owners of the Kulm Hotel, offered land and financial support. A gala raised almost eleven thousand Swiss francs. The hotel and the club would share the cost.
There was already some experience to draw on. Bobbers had watered corners on the cantonal road and allowed them to freeze. They understood that a fast run was built a bucket at a time, then maintained for hours after the builders had finished shaping it.
The new course followed the valley from St. Moritz towards Celerina, echoing the practical journey at the centre of the Wilson Smith story. But this time the route belonged to the sleds.
On New Year’s Day, 1904, the Olympia Bobrun opened with a race.
The change was larger than separating sport from traffic.
A purpose-built track is another part of the machine. Its gradients accelerate the sled. Its banks redirect it. Its surface changes with temperature, shade, snow and the work of the track crew. A bobsleigh does not travel over a passive background. Sled and track negotiate every corner together.
That remains unusually visible at St. Moritz. The current Olympia Bobrun is about seventeen hundred metres long, drops around one hundred and thirty metres and contains nineteen corners. It is still built from snow and water, without permanent artificial refrigeration.
Every winter, the course has to be made again.
The shape is inherited. The physical track is temporary.
That distinction changes who the engineer is. On a permanent refrigerated track, the concrete fixes much of the geometry. At St. Moritz, the builders interpret the inherited line through snow, water and weather. They work before the riders arrive and continue after the surface has been cut by runners. A corner is not simply constructed and left. It is watched, repaired and adjusted through the season.
The earliest bobbers had watered bends on the public road, sometimes spending hours maintaining them. The dedicated run expanded the same act to the scale of a valley. The vehicle was engineered in the workshop. Its other half was engineered outside, in freezing air.
That makes it a fitting monument to a sport whose origin cannot be pinned to one permanent object. The first bob may be lost, but the act of building its home survives each season.
And building the track did not end the invention. It made the next mistakes possible at greater speed.
Faster than the solution
By 1912, some crews were riding ventre à terre—belly to earth. Instead of sitting upright, the crew lay forward along the machine to reduce air resistance.
It was faster.
It also made braking extremely difficult.
The sport was spreading beyond the private clubs at the same time. In 1923, with a winter sports week planned at Chamonix, delegates formed an international bobsleigh federation in Paris. The following winter, bobsleigh appeared at the event we now call the first Winter Olympics.
There was one race. Crews of four and five competed against one another. Nine sleds from five countries started. Three crashed.
The event reveals how unfinished the sport remained. It had reached the Olympics before agreeing on one crew size, and the course was poor enough that a third of the field failed to stay upright. The Olympics did not certify a finished machine. They created a larger stage on which the remaining problems became impossible to ignore.
Four years later, the Games came to St. Moritz. The sport returned to the place where its clubs, machines and dedicated track had taken shape—but now the experiments were international rules.
The style spread anyway. At the 1928 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz, twenty-one teams entered the bobsleigh event. Twenty used the prone position.
This is a recurring rhythm in the early story. A new idea creates speed. The speed exposes a safety problem. Rules arrive after the evidence.
The prone style was banned in 1931, after years of argument. That same year, international bobsleigh introduced compulsory helmets. The St. Moritz club bought one hundred helmets at twenty francs each and rented them for two francs a day.
The sequence matters. The first club rules had tried to protect riders and road traffic from meeting. Three decades later the sport was protecting riders from the consequences of the line they had chosen inside a dedicated track.
Even the problem of returning the sled uphill became an engineering story. After a run, a heavy bob sat at the bottom of the valley. In 1920, the club tried using lorries to carry the machines back to the start. The engines were too weak. Horses were quicker.
The supposedly modern sport had produced a machine that the modern truck could not conveniently retrieve, so it returned to the animal that the blacksmith who built its ancestor would have known best.
Only in the early 1930s did lorries take over and sharply reduce transport costs.
By then Carl and Fritz Feierabend were developing all-metal bobs. Bodies and axles would continue to change. Aerodynamic shells would turn the open sled into the enclosed form we recognise now. Timing would move from a telephone call and a clock at the start to electronic measurement precise enough to make thousandths of a second meaningful.
But the essential arrangement had already appeared in the 1890s: steer at the front, brake at the back, put a crew between them, and trust the track to turn falling into racing.
What was actually invented?
So who invented bobsleigh?
If invention means the first timed event from which the sliding sports grew, the answer begins with Symonds, Minsch, Robertson and the other racers on the road from Davos in 1883.
If it means coupling two small sleds beneath one platform, Stephen Whitney has a strong claim in Davos, and Wilson Smith has the famous claim in St. Moritz.
If it means turning that principle into a purpose-built crew machine, the answer is Christian Mathis working with William Bulpett.
If it means turning the machine into an organised sport, add Mrs Shepley, Miss Cousins and the other members who wrote the first club rules, placed lookouts on the corners and made races happen.
If it means creating the environment that lets a bob become fully itself, add the track builders who shaped the Olympia Bobrun out of snow and water.
There is no need to force one of these answers to defeat the others.
Bobsleigh was invented in layers.
First, a road became a race.
Then two sleds became one vehicle.
The vehicle acquired steering, a brake and a crew.
The crew acquired rules.
And when the whole arrangement became too fast for ordinary life, the sport built itself a road where nothing else was allowed.
That is also why this history matters when bobsleigh is turned into a game. A game cannot store every rope, bolt, runner profile, patch of ice and movement of four separate bodies. It has to decide which relationships make the sport legible.
Front and back. Steering and braking. Risk and speed. Sled and track. One person making an input while several people live with it.
The earliest machines are useful because their logic is exposed. There is no aerodynamic shell to hide the structure. You can see the two sleds, the board, the pivot and the brake. The history looks like a diagram.
The Wilson Smith story survives because it contains everything an origin story needs. A named inventor. A simple need. Two toboggans. One plank. And a garden rake dragged through the snow.
It may even be true.
But the fuller story is better.
It has a postman tying an Australian cricketer on a public road. It has an ill historian discovering that organising a race is one way to belong to a place. It has Davos beating St. Moritz on the track St. Moritz built to answer Davos. It has an American whose new machine is banned, so he removes half of it and wins anyway. It has a British major bringing an idea to a Swiss blacksmith. It has women written into the first club committee, two telephones timing a race, horses hauling machines that trucks cannot manage, and athletes lying face down because speed arrives before good sense.
The contradictions do not weaken the beginning of bobsleigh. They reveal what the beginning really was: not a moment, but a crowded decade in which practical sleds, resort rivalry, local skill and imported ideas kept colliding.
People already knew how to slide down a mountain.
Bobsleigh began when they tried to do it together—and turned a wooden sled into a vehicle, a road into a track, and a winter journey into a technological contest.
The most elaborate of the sliding sports began with the cheapest possible transport hack.
Slidensa is an independent game about bobsleigh, luge and skeleton. Sources, a transcript and the project are at slidensa.com.
Next time: a complete racing world recovered from less data than a modern phone photo uses for a thumbnail.