(1909) , Finland (2012) The first snow plows were horse-drawn wedge-plows made of wood. The earliest reference found by the
Oxford English Dictionary was written in 1792 in a description of
New Hampshire: With the advent of rail travel and later, the automobile, a number of inventors set about to improve existing snow plows. In the US, the "snow-clearer" is said to have been patented as early as the 1840s, for railways. The first snow plow ever built specifically for use with motor equipment was in 1913. It was manufactured by Good Roads Machinery in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, and was designed to meet the requirements outlined by engineers of the New York City Street Cleaning Bureau. Good Roads is therefore unofficially credited as the originator of the modern snow plow, though their horse drawn steel blade road graders were used to clear roads of snow as early as the company's founding in 1878 under their original name American Road Machinery. Carl Frink of
Clayton, New York, was also an early manufacturer of truck-mounted snowplows. His company, Frink Snowplows, now
Frink-America, was founded by some accounts as early as 1920. For the winter of 1919, Frink, owner of a tire and machine shop, manufactured and equipped a bus with a steel V-blade snowplow for a Clayton to Watertown bus line. In 1920, Frink equipped a Linn halftrack with a snowplow and side-blades for Black River Bus Lines and started his snowplow business. The Linn Co. immediately started to equip their halftracks with snowplows and heavily promoted their superior traction; they dominated the eastern market until the 1930s when the halftracks were supplanted by the much faster four-wheel drive trucks. In 1923, the brothers Hans and Even Øveraasen of Norway constructed an early snowplow for use on cars. This proved to be the start of a tradition in snow-clearing equipment for roads, railways and airports, as well as the foundation of the company Øveraasen Snow Removal Systems. ==Railway snowplows==