A snowblower is a powerful machine that clears snow from driveways, sidewalks, and roads by scooping it up with a rotating blade and shooting it out through a chute. Picture a lawnmower designed for winter: instead of cutting grass, it devours snow and blasts it off to the side, sometimes throwing it 20 or 30 feet away.

Snowblowers come in different sizes. Small ones you push look like lawnmowers and work well for light snowfall on a driveway. Larger models are self-propelled or even ride-on machines that can handle deep snow and wide areas. The biggest snowblowers, mounted on trucks, clear highways and airport runways after major winter storms.

Before snowblowers became common in the 1950s and 1960s, people cleared snow with shovels, which meant hours of exhausting work after every storm. Today, a snowblower can clear a driveway in 15 minutes instead of an hour of backbreaking shoveling. The machine's roaring engine and the arc of white snow shooting through the air are familiar sights in snowy regions during winter months.