BANGOR DAILY NEWS • December 15, 2025
Maine ingenuity has brought the world everything from earmuffs, invented in the 1870s by Farmington resident Chester Greenwood, to life-saving medicine like insulin, discovered in the 1920s by a team that included Pembroke native Charles Best. It also helped spur the creation of a machine made to improve the ability of Maine woodsmen to move logs through the forest — the direct precursor to everything from military tanks to the snowmobiles that zoom down Maine trails today. The Lombard steam log hauler, first patented in 1901, was the work of Alvin Orlando Lombard, who was born in the Penobscot County town of Springfield in 1856.