Built on a Quebec Farm: The Snow Machine That Replaced an Army of Shovelers

In 1894, a seventeen-year-old farm boy near Montreal watched a grain thresher throw straw into the air and wondered if a machine like it could throw snow. It took Arthur Sicard more than thirty years to build it. On February 26, 1929, the United States granted him patent 1,703,786 for a "snow removing machine." But in Duluth, Minnesota, the Beckwith family tells a different story: a county road man who built an auger snow machine around 1927 and never filed a patent. And in Dubuque, Iowa, a tin shop turned the idea into the Sno-Go, a 175-horsepower rotary snow blower that rode a train to Rocky Mountain National Park, cleared Trail Ridge Road and even went to war. Who really invented the snowblower? We follow the paper trail: patent drawings, National Park Service records and a 2007 newspaper interview. 🌨️ IN THIS VIDEO How Sicard's 1925 snow remover worked, from his original U.S. patent drawings Why a railroad rotary snowplow could never clear a city street The armies of snow shovelers in New York and Montreal before machines Ralph Beckwith's Duluth machine and the visitors from Iowa The Klauer Sno-Go: only 39 built between 1928 and 1934 Sno-Go No. 107 on Trail Ridge Road and at Rapid City Army Air Base in 1943 How Sicard's company crossed the border to Watertown, New York ⏱️ CHAPTERS 0:00 The Farmer and the Patent 1:09 The Army of Shovels 3:18 The Thresher 4:04 Thirty Winters 6:24 Outremont, 1927 7:12 The Man Who Never Filed 8:55 The Super Snow Remover 10:19 Over the Top 12:36 Across the Border 14:01 What Remains ABOUT SNOWPLOW USA: We tell the true stories of the machines and people who kept America moving through winter, from rotary snowplows to the first snowblowers, with real documents instead of legends. 🔔 SUBSCRIBE for more forgotten winter machines!