February 15, 2021 • 48 mins
We learn who invented the lawnmower, how lawnmowers evolved, and why we even have lawns in the first place. Hint: it has to do with castles in the Middle Ages.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and the Love all Things Tech, And while I've been
recording shows from my home for nearly a year now,
(00:27):
I still occasionally get reminded about how things can be
different from when I was working in the office. For
the most part, things are kind of like this is
this is the normal now. However, at the office, there
is no chance that my dog will be barking in
the background while I record, and so far, I think
I've mostly avoided having him show up on episodes of
(00:51):
Tech Stuff, but only because I've edited around it. Keep
telling him if he wants to be on a show,
he should get his own podcast, But I'm also scared
that if he does that, he'll get way more popular
than me. You're also not likely to hear other extraneous
noises at the office because there are studios are recording
studios are all in rooms that don't have a window
(01:11):
to the outside world built into them, though you can
still occasionally pick up sounds of folks who are chatting
in the office outside the studios because well, at least
in the office, we used to be a pretty chatty lot.
So if you listen to any of the stuff shows,
if you listen very carefully, you might occasionally hear the
sounds of people talking outside that studio room. That's because
(01:37):
there are desks and stuff just on the other side
of those doors. But one noise that has been a
particular issue for me while working at home has been
the sound of the landscape crew that's working on the
courtyard outside the townhouse I live in. They always seem
to show up just as I'm getting ready to record.
(01:58):
And then I thought, hey, how about I talk about
the history of lawnmowers and how they work. That could
be a great topic and turn that frustration I feel
into an episode. So let's begin with some etymology, which
I am now being told is not the study of bugs,
but rather the origin of words. So we think of
(02:21):
a lawn, you know, as a grassy area like a yard,
typically covered by turf grass in fact, and that is
somewhat kept in an orderly fashion, partly by cutting the
grass fairly low. But where does the word lawn come from? Well,
the word derives from a Middle English word of lander,
(02:42):
meaning an unwitted field or an open space in the
woods like a glade. Thanks Miriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. Now
y'all might know back in my college days, I studied
medieval literature, including Old and Middle English nexts and so
immediately I thought of our old pal Jeffrey Chaucer, known
(03:05):
for composing the Canterbury Tales, though then he thoughtlessly went
off and died before he finished writing them. But he
also wrote a poem called Parliament of Fouls that mentions
a Lawnda, which, hey, that poem also references Valentine's Day
later on, and since we just had Valentine's Day, this
episode is now timely. So the whole poem is far
(03:28):
too long for me to read. It's like seven lines long,
but I will give you the little bit of it
that's about the LAWNDA. And the passage goes like this,
and then a lawanda upon the Hilla of Flores was set.
This noble goddess Natier of branches were here Harlis and
her bores. He wrought after haircraft, and here measure. Now
(03:49):
this passage goes on a bit longer, but honestly, I
would just be indulging my own love of medieval English lit.
So I'm going to cut it off there. What that
passage means in modern English is and in an opening
in the woods, on a hill covered with flowers sat
the goddess Nature. Her home was made of branches and
arranged according to her art. So it's a pretty little passage.
(04:13):
And here Londa refers to something you might encounter if
you were walking through the countryside, through the wooded forests
of old England or old France, and then at one
point you encounter an opening in the forest where there
aren't any trees. So how did it come to mean
(04:34):
the word lawn that we use today? Well, to understand
that we have to talk about war. Yes, just as
many a homeowner has suspected lawn care and warfare go
hand in hand. Okay, So you got your big medieval
big wig types. You know, you've got your kings and
(04:55):
your lords and your earls and whatnot. And occasionally these
types would lead large groups of warriors to conquer other
medieval big wig types, something like, hey, those guys over
there got it pretty good, So why don't we go
over there and take their stuff and make it our stuff?
(05:15):
And so the world turns upon such thoughts. But it's
not enough to conquer the people who live on the
other side of the hills or river or ocean or whatever.
You got to hold on to the land that you've claimed, right,
and that means creating fortifications, preferably in places where you
can get a pretty good look at your surroundings to
(05:37):
make sure no other medieval big wigs get the same
bright idea you got. And then they come to take
your stuff and it used to be someone else's stuff,
because you know there's always a bigger fish, as it were,
So you build up your forts, or your castles as
it were, to protect your assets. Your castles are your
defense system where you can pull back if necessary if
(05:59):
it am he's come to call. But you can't really
be on the lookout for the next bully if you
can't see the armies for the trees, right, and so
it gets to chopping. You chop, chop, chop all those
trees down around your fortifications so that you can see
folks from a long way off if they're approaching, and
you can prepare if there's an imminent attack. It also
helps if you know you don't leave trees around for
(06:21):
people to cut down and turn into stuff like battering ramps,
So there's that element as well. So rather than wooded fields,
you have grassy ones. And this is the origin of
the lawn though back in those days the lawns weren't
exactly you know, pristine, So to maintain the lawns, you'd
either have livestock go out to the fields to graze,
(06:42):
thus cutting back the grass by eating it, as well
as fertilizing the land on occasion, you know, when nature called,
or you could have laborers go out to the fields
with hand tools like scythes and sickles to cut back
the grass manually so that it wasn't too high. A
sickle is a handheld tool that has a handle, typically
(07:05):
made out of wood, and on the business end, you've
got a curved blade sticking out from the handle, making
kind of like a almost like a half moon, you know,
sort of crescent shaped, and the blade is also typically
at an angle relative to the handles, sort of how
a razor has an angle to it for the purposes
(07:25):
of shaving aside is similar, but it's much larger. It's
a two handed tool. The grim Reaper carries a scythe
and cutting with either a sickle or a side involves
making horizontal passes, typically at the base of the grass,
and you cut in an arc from one side to
(07:45):
the other and big arcing swings so semicircular swings, and
those swings only go in one direction. The blade is
is sharpened on the inside curve, not the outside curve,
and you're typically going right left because the handle for
the forward hand on a scythe is meant to be
held with the right hand. The left hand is meant
(08:07):
to hold the scythe further back on the on the handle,
so in other words, this is yet another right handed tool.
Scything can actually be pretty efficient. There are actually there's
some great videos on YouTube of people who have really
gotten skilled with scything and they can make short work
of an overgrown lawn like they can cut that stuff
(08:29):
down quickly. I suggest you check it out. It's just
neat to watch. And the angle of the blade determines
how short the scythe will cut the grass. Using a
scythe with a good blade angle, a skilled wheelder can
cut the grass very low and pretty efficiently too, and
you would have the bottom part of the blade actually
(08:50):
making contact with the ground as you swing the scythe
from right to left. They also tend to have to
rake up the yard after were to gather up all
the trimmings. Were usually looking at fields that have, you know,
grass that's quite high, like maybe a foot high or
maybe taller, so you need to have something to to
(09:12):
rake up all the clippings that you've left behind. I've
seen a lot of videos of folks using sides in
order to cut back on, you know, relying on fossil
fuels and to make use of the trimmings in various ways,
from compost to making hay while the sun shines. In
some videos, I've seen folks use scythes more effectively than
someone who is using a mechanical push mower or a
(09:35):
weed whacker, though power mowers do tend to be more
efficient than a scythe. So a push mower, like a
mechanical one where there's no motor, it's just from human
power that versus a scythe, you might actually see someone
be more effective with the side than with the push mower.
(09:56):
Weed whackers same thing, uh, the push mower that has
a motor are on it. Those tend to win out
in the end, so it really does start to make
you wonder, however, why the heck did anyone think to
invent the mechanical lawnmower in the first place. If a
scythe can be as efficient, why would anyone ever think
about making a mechanical invention that does effectively the same
(10:21):
sort of thing. The first lawnmowers were purely mechanical, relying
on gears and blades that were mounted on a drum
like cylinder. And if those aren't more efficient than a scythe,
why would you bother? And the answer is drumroll please vanity. See.
While in the medieval era, soldiers wanted to get a
(10:42):
good view of what might be coming at them throughout Europe,
particularly in France and England, the strategic usefulness of castle's
gradually declined in the Middle Ages, largely because of advancements
in artillery. Cannons could make very short work of castle
walls and so warfare began to change and castles weren't
(11:03):
part of that. But you still had all these hoity
toity types who liked the idea of a well maintained lawn, again,
mostly in France and England. That's really where this idea
took hold, and this was definitely an issue of vanity,
particularly when it came to showing off your prestige. Lawns
are not natural environments when you get down to it,
(11:25):
they can be environmentally unfriendly. They represent a much more
limited biome than a natural grassy or wooded area. It's
an artificial construct. It's really an example of humans cutting
back nature to suit our own esthetics. And really it
was only the hoity toity types doing this, because maintaining
a lawn was a lot of work. Not that the
(11:47):
hoity toity types were the ones doing the work, mind you,
but they were the ones who could afford livestock or
laborers who would trend back stuff for them. So from
mannor houses to abbittant castles you had the practice of
maintaining these large grassy areas. Now, some of that sensibility
would also find its way over to the New World
(12:09):
where it really took hold. Now, the grasses in the
New World were different than those found in Europe. But
when settlers came to North America, they brought with them livestock,
and apparently the livestock really liked the grass in America
so much so that they ding dang durnate at all.
So to keep the livestock from starving, the colonists were
(12:30):
importing grass seeds from Europe and North Africa, including grasses that,
if you were to go by their names, sound like
they come from America. Kentucky blue grass, I'm looking at you,
You ain't from Kentucky. Thomas Jefferson was said to have
taken up the goal of creating a manicured lawn at
Monticello after he visited France, and George Washington had a
(12:53):
similar desire to turn his estate of Mountain Vernon into
a mirror of European standards. And certainly the d of
a well kept lawn managed to really take hold in America,
becoming something of an obsession really, which will cover a
little bit later in this episode, and certain sports definitely
helped things along, for which we can largely thank the Scots.
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Scottish sports like golf and lawn bowling were brought over
by Scottish immigrants to America and they became popular past
times for those who had the leisure to pursue such things.
But to play lawn games, you gotta cut the grass,
otherwise you're gonna spend more time trying to find the
game equipment than you get to play with the darn things.
Now we're gonna come back to the evolution of the lawn,
(13:36):
particularly in America, and just a little bit as that
history ties into a lot of other interesting stuff and
includes some heavy duty connections to other elements of American
society in addition to feeding an entire industry dedicated to
lawn care and maintenance. But let's get back to our
early history of lawn mowers. Okay, So, by the nineteenth century,
(13:58):
lawns were the rage and in land France and starting
to be in America. But as I said, unless you
had livestock or the cash to pay laborers, you probably
couldn't maintain a lawn on your own. You certainly couldn't
do so to the immaculate standards of the aristocracy. The
wealthy would spend a lot to get that perfect lawn,
(14:19):
even going so far as to hire people to use
handheld shears to cut grass down quite low and to
avoid the patterns that you would see if you used scythes,
because cutting grass and those arc swings would leave behind
patterns in the grass, and that was considered aesthetically unpleasing.
And then we come to an Englishman named Edwin Beard
(14:41):
Budding born in Stroud, Gloucestershire. In Budding started off with
some strikes against him. His parents were unmarried, his father
a farmer, and in England, that put him at a
fairly low social standing. Class in England was a very
important concept still, and b while over there the whole
(15:03):
working class versus posh and all that sort of stuff.
So he started off in carpentry, but he switched over
to working at iron foundries. The Industrial Revolution was well
underway in England at this point and the demand for
iron tools and machinery was very high, and through experience,
Budding built up an understanding of engineering and problem solving.
(15:25):
He would end up inventing several things or making his
own version of some existing machines, but obviously the one
we want to really look at is the lawnmower. Budding
got the idea for the lawnmower when he saw a
device used by textile mills to trim back the fibers
that stick out from the surface of cloth, also known
as the nap of a cloth, and with some textiles
(15:49):
the goal is to fluff the nap out, use little
combs or or prickly flowers even to pull some of
those threads out, and then you comb it a certain way,
which can make the cloth softer to the touch and
better at doing stuff like trapping heat. But sometimes you
just wanted a very smooth piece of cloth, something that
wouldn't get caught easily on rough surfaces. So, for example,
(16:13):
you might want a carpet that could withstand more use
as long as it did you know, catch on shoes
and stuff. So you would want to shear the nap.
You'd want to cut that nap close to the cloth,
And in earlier days this job was done by skilled
tradespeople who would use giant sets of shears, I mean,
these things were massive in order to cut the nap
(16:34):
off the surface of the cloths as efficiently as possible.
But by Butting's time, some genius whose name is lost
to history came up with the notion of building a
mechanical device that has blades arranged around a drum or
cylinder in a type of helix shape. The drum or
cylinder rotates, and by running the surface of the cloth
(16:57):
near this helix of blades, the blade could trim back
the nap on the surface of the cloth. Add in
some rollers and some other elements to pull the cloth along,
and you've got yourself a machine that can trim the
nap back on cloth evenly, consistently, and efficiently. Ah ha,
said Budding. What if I took that same basic idea
(17:18):
and flipped it around a bit, so you could trim
back grass with rotating blades along a cylinder, And in
eight thirty that's just what he did, securing a patent
number six zero eight one in fact for his invention.
I'll explain more about it after this quick break. Budding
(17:42):
saw an opportunity to create a device that could consistently
and reliably cut grass a specific length, so, in other words,
you could adjust how tall the grass would be and
without leaving those marks behind that you would get if
you were to cut grass with scythes and such. Also,
the lawnmower wooden poop on the lawn. Unlike livestock. It
(18:05):
would be particularly handy for parks and sporting grounds where
the well to do could gather for their leisure time
and look for something, you know, orderly and neat, which
very much fit in with the sensibilities of the elite
of nineteenth century Britain. So Edwin Beard Butting built a
wheeled machine out of rought and cast iron. Had a
(18:27):
pair of wheels. It also had a pair of rollers,
and a forward roller and a back roller, uh, as
well as the blade mounted cylinder that did the actual cutting.
So imagine you've got a mechanical device has a small
roller in the front. This is the thing that can
be adjusted so you can control how close to the
ground you're cutting the grass. Behind that roller, you've got
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your horizontal cylinder that's got the curved blades arranged in
a helix around that rotatble cylinder, so it rotates along
the horizontal axis, is what I'm saying. To either side
of that are the wheels of the lawnmower. That provides stability,
allows you to actually aim it and push it along
(19:10):
the ground. And then in the rear you have a
big roller. It kind of looks like a more narrow
and slightly smaller version of a steam roller, if that
helps you imagine this. Buttons design also incorporated a tray
to catch grass clippings. The tray was in the front
because the way this machine worked, it would propel the
(19:32):
clippings out, shooting them out towards the front of the machine.
That way, you wouldn't have to follow behind the lawnmower
with a rake or something like that to to rake
up the clippings. And it was that rear roller, the
big steam roller type thing in the back that connected
to the bladed cylinder through a gear drive. That's where
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you've got a series of gears that fit together to
transfer the rotational motion of the roller that's pressed against
the ground. So as you push the lawnmower forward, the
roller rolls because it's making contact with the ground, and
it transfers that rotational motion to the cylinder or the
(20:16):
drama if you prefer, that's got the blades on it.
And all of this was made out of iron. Now
this meant the person who was pushing the mower had
to use a pretty good amount of force because you
weren't just pushing hard enough to move the mower itself,
which being made out of iron, was pretty darn heavy,
but also to power that drive train of gears that
(20:38):
would you know, transmit the rotation to the cylinder. And
each step of that process, each gear connection means that
you're losing a little bit of the amount of energy
you're giving to the system to stuff like friction, So
it means you have to push even harder to get
things going. But still, Budding showed that the same general
principle that worked for cutting back the nap on cloth
(21:01):
could in fact be used to cut grass. He patented
his design in eighteen thirty, and in that patent Budding
said his invention represented quote a new combination and application
of machinery for the purpose of cropping or sharing the
vegetable surfaces of lawns, grass plats and pleasure grounds. Country
gentlemen may find and using my machine themselves, and amusing
(21:24):
useful and healthy exercise end quote. It's interesting to note
that a lot of the basic designs introduced by Budding
would stick around throughout the ages with mechanical push mowers,
and the ones that we have today have at least
some resemblance to the one that Budding was making back
in the mid nineteenth century. Now they the new ones
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are are more elegant in design, and they're made of
much lighter materials, but the general principle behind the operation
remains pretty much the same. Budding formed a partnership with
an engineer named John Farrabee, who owned a company called
Phoenix iron Works. Fairby had the manufacturing rights to produce
Buddings design and fronted the costs to develop the prototype,
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and one of the earliest lawnmowers that the pair produced
went to the London Zoo and another one became the
property of Oxford University. By eighteen thirty two, word had
already spread that Buddings machine could create great results, and
demand was soon outpacing Farraby's capacity to produce lawnmowers, and
(22:32):
Fairby then began to license the design to other engineers
to other iron works owners, including Ransoms of Ipswich, a
company that was already in the business of producing plows
for farmers. They advertised the new lawnmower invention saying, quote
the machine is so easy to manage that persons unpracticed
(22:53):
in the art of mowing may cut the grass on
lawns and bowling greens with ease end quote and the words.
They were kind of positioning this as something of a
leisure activity for uh, for the upper class, that you know,
mowing the lawn with a side that was a low
(23:14):
class thing to do that was for laborers. You wouldn't
see people of the upper classes do that. It was
beneath their station. But mowing with this exotic machine that
was something befitting a person of high station. And it was,
as a matter of fact, pretty simple to operate these things.
You just grabbed the handle of the mower and you
(23:35):
pushed it forward, kind of like a cart. You would
exert a little bit of a downward push as you did.
So it took far less skilled than scything did. And
by framing the activity of mowing a lawn as a
means of taking exercise and being out in nature, the
companies were slowly shifting the perception of caring for a
lawn in general. And this would also help later on
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as the lawn mower would be marketed towards the middle class,
when the prices would eventually come down. Now, when I
say the demand was outstripping supply, we have to remember
that manufacturing in the eighteen thirties wasn't nearly as efficient
as it would be a century later. So I don't
want to give you the impression that the lawnmower became
(24:19):
the must have Christmas gift of eighteen thirty two. Or something.
When Budding passed away in eighteen forty six because of
a stroke. The lawnmower was a successful invention, but it
was not yet a household item, so it wasn't like
Budding had become a millionaire. In fact, he died before
(24:39):
really seeing his invention get adopted around England, France, and America.
By the eighteen sixties, Farrabees Iron Works had produced around
five thousand lawnmowers, and that included a small range of
designs which mainly had to do with the width of
the lawnmower. A wider lawnmower can obviously cut a wider
(25:02):
strip of grass, which means you don't have to do
as many passes on a lawn or a field in
order to complete a job, but it also means that
the lawnmower gets heavier. Some of the designs incorporated a
second handle on the lawnmower. This one would be toward
the front of the machine, which meant you could actually
pull it along behind you instead of pushing it in
(25:25):
front of you. One design I saw had the handle
on a hinge so you could swing the handle so
you could swing it toward the rear of the machine.
And make it a push mower, or you could swing
it to the front of the machine and make it
a pull mower. Buttings design inspired others to make their
own adjustments. In eighteen forty two, Alexander Shanks, an inventor
(25:47):
from Scotland, made a version of the lawnmower that could
be hitched to a horse or pony, which allowed him
to make even larger lawnmowers that would be far too
heavy for a person to push or pull on their own.
To prevent the horses from damaging the grass. Let's say
that you're cutting the grass on a golf course, something
that was very common in Scotland or tennis courts. Well,
(26:10):
they would put little leather shoes on the horses hoofs,
so the horse would be wearing booties in order to
mow the lawn. In the eighteen fifties, inventor Thomas Green
made some adjustments of his own to the lawnmower design,
and one simple tweak was that he added a rake
to help lift grass blades up a little bit for cutting,
(26:30):
so that way you didn't end up with any missed bits.
But in the late eighteen fifties he made a much
more substantial change. He created a chain drive for the
mower's blades instead of the gear drive that Budding had created,
and by removing the need for so many cast iron
gears and replacing them with a chain, he made the
(26:51):
lawnmowers design simpler and importantly lighter. It was also apparently
less noisy, as Green called is lawnmower the Sileon's messar
for silent running. By this time, thirty years after the
invention of the lawnmower, word had reached America, and in
eighteen sixty eight an inventor from Connecticut named Amariah Hills
(27:15):
received a patent for improvements to Budding's lawnmower design, which
included changing out a cylinder covered in blades to an
open spiral cutter. So just imagine a helix of blades,
but you no longer have the mounted on a cylinder.
It's almost like it's just two blades. And that that
(27:36):
mount two wheels on either side that can turn. Uh.
He also allowed more fine tuning for the cutting height
and changed how the handle attached to the frame of
the mower, and his design would go on to become
a very popular mower in the northeastern United states, sometimes
called an archimedian mower because the blades resembled the classic
(27:56):
archimedian screw. Many of these machines saw you in parks
and for maintaining stuff like golf courses and tennis courts
and the like. But over in America they would also
be sought after because of a few other big factors,
and one is the growth of the suburbs. So, after
the Civil War in America and as the US was
having its own boom in industry, cities were becoming more
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industrialized in general, and many people, at least many wealthy people,
the people who could afford it, moved out of the
cities and settled in surrounding areas near the cities, forming
the suburbs. And like the French and English aristocracy a
century earlier, many of them saw a well maintained lawn
as something of a status symbol. So there was a
(28:42):
general movement toward cutting lawns, which must have pleased Amiah
Hill as it represented a demand for those Archimedean mowers.
And in eighteen seventy, Frank J. Scott's The Art of
Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds of Small Extent hit the presses.
This book, which is six d eighteen pages in length,
(29:06):
if we don't include all the advertisements. At the end
of the book, it goes to what I can only
describe as excruciating detail regarding how to make your lawn
look absolutely magnificent, and further, you are a monster if
you don't do it. You can read the whole thing
(29:26):
over on the Smithsonian Libraries website if you would like.
If you want to skip to the juicy stuff, go
to page one, D seven, Chapter thirteen, The Lawn. The
chapter opens up with a couple of references to poetry,
followed by this passage quote, A smooth, closely shaven surface
of grass is by far the most essential element of
(29:48):
beauty on the grounds of a suburban home. End quote boom,
mic drop. You don't mow your grass, you are an
affront to beauty. Now I'm being a little, you know,
facetious here, but Scott was arguing that in an age
in which companies were laying down train tracks or street
(30:09):
car lines more people from far and wide, we're passing
through different neighborhoods and then judging those neighborhoods based on
their aesthetic beauty or lack thereof, and isn't it more
American to be proud of your community and to show
it off with distinction. So rich suburbanites ate that stuff
up man and so lawn care started to be a
(30:32):
big business. It was boosted more with related inventions such
as Joseph Lessler's lawn sprinkler, which could attach to a
garden hose. Lawns need a good deal of water to
remain healthy. That's what kind of touch on that again
in a bit. And this was a way where you
could water your lawn without having to do a lot
of backbreaking work in the process. And again, the concept
(30:54):
of lawn care being connected to exercise and being out
of doors was a big part of all this too.
So while America's obsession with lawn care began to take root,
so to speak, we had other stuff going on at
the same time. Sometime around or so, inventors began to
incorporate the next logical element for lawnmowers steam engines. Yes,
(31:18):
steam powered lawnmowers were a thing briefly, and why not.
Steam engines had already been used for trains for decades,
so why not strap a big old boiler to a
mechanical lawnmower. And make the boiling water do all the work.
So here's how these things worked. In general. You had
your boiler, which is the name suggests, is the container
(31:39):
holding the water that gets boiled off to produce steam.
The boiler is pressurized so the steam can't just escape
and has to go through a specific route. And typically
you would have a valve that would allow steam to
pass through under really incredible pressure. So a furnace heats
the boiler up, the water starts to boil off, and
(32:00):
the steam builds up and passes through valves to a
cylinder that has a piston in it. The steam forces
the piston down the length of the cylinder until the
piston passes an exhaust valve, whereupon the steam escapes the cylinder,
the piston returns to its starting position, and the whole
thing can happen again. Attaching mechanical elements to the piston
(32:23):
via a piston rod allows you to transfer that mechanical
motion to other components such as the wheels and the
cutting blades of a lawnmower. And bang, now you don't
have to push it yourself or hitch it to a
horse or something. You just gotta fill up the boiler
from time to time. You gotta keep that furnace going
and keep it really hot, and you know, you just
(32:43):
gotta not explode, which is something that can happen if
pressure builds up in a boiler and the steam has
nowhere to go. But hey, a boiler explosion is a
small price to pay for a well manicured lawn. Right. Okay,
I'm clearly getting snow archy again. But these lawnmowers did work,
and I've seen some that look like the results you
(33:04):
would get if you crossed a locomotive with a mechanical
push mower along with a riding lawnmower. You would sit
in front of the boiler, which would be mounted at
the rear of the lawnmower, and you would use controls
to steer yourself as you rode along and moved down
a lawn or field, and the steam engine provides all
the two wheels and the blades. It's neat, if a
(33:27):
little intimidating. These things were huge, and they had to
be because if you're using steam, you need to have
a big boiler to hold enough water so that you've
got the the mp for your your engine. These clearly
were not intended for the average homeowner or even the
upper middle class or lower upper class homeowners. These were
(33:47):
more for you know, larger, more regularly level areas. They
didn't do well if there were hills or anything like that,
so these were more frequently used for something like a
a flat land, endscaped park, or you know, a sporting
area like a golf course or maybe a tennis court.
(34:07):
They also didn't stick around for very long. And when
we come back, I'll talk about the development of the
gas powered lawnmower, which would take the steam out of
its predecessor for a couple of good reasons. But first
let's take another quick break. Before I get into more
(34:31):
modern mowers, I should mention another inventor, this one named
John Albert Burr. He made changes to the classic cylindrical
lawnmower design so that the gears wouldn't easily get gummed
up with lawn clippings. Essentially, they figured out, hey, if
we cover these gears up so that the lawn clippings
can't get in the gearworks, then you're not gonna have
(34:52):
as many jams as you try and mow your lawn.
He also created a mower that would allow landscapers to
mow more closely to the edge of walls and buildings
to get a neater cut. Also, around this time, improvements
in manufacturing meant that companies could mass produce lawnmowers, which
also meant the costs of production dropped, and that meant
(35:14):
companies could drop the prices of those machines, and that
meant more people were able to afford lawnmowers, and in
American particular, that meant booming business. As the idea that
a well kept lawn was an important component of being
seen as an upstanding member of society it had really
taken hold here. So this combination of elements led to
(35:36):
a lot more people buying lawnmowers. And when I say that,
remember I'm still talking about the mechanical push mower style devices. Well,
the steam powered lawnmowers appeared on the scene in the
eighteen nineties, but by nineteen o two, Ransoms, the company
I mentioned much earlier in this episode as one of
the first to license Budding's lawnmower design for production, Well,
(35:59):
they created the first lawnmower that used an internal combustion
engine for power. This was a ride on mower and
it was a big one. So this was not a
push mower. This this was a gigantic monstrosity. In fact,
the images I've seen of this thing make it look
like there's a gentleman in a jacket and tweed hat
(36:20):
who is taking a printing press out for a ride
or something. It's a machine with big, heavy chains, enormous rollers,
a large container in front to catch clippings, and whirling
blades of destruction underneath. It looks pretty awesome, I think,
and almost unreal. It certainly isn't what I think of
when someone says lawn mower to me. The internal combustion
(36:42):
engine was the death knell for steam powered lawnmowers. While
Ransom's ride on mower was huge, the switch to an
internal combustion engine would lead to smaller lawnmower designs. And
you didn't need an enormous boiler like you would with
a steam powered one, nor did you have to stoke
some sort of furnace to keep things going. You just
(37:05):
needed some petrol in the fuel tank. Now, I've talked
about how internal combustion engines work and other episodes, so
I'm not going to go into all that detail here,
but I will say that the early versions of the
motor powered lawn mowers really in other forms, seemed to
be based on that cylindrical helix design along the horizontal axis,
(37:25):
the same sort of design that Budding had proposed way
back in eighteen thirty. So these were not the rotary
mowers that we would see much later, not yet, but
the advances in internal combustion engines, which would both make
the mowers get smaller and more powerful as various engineers
made improvements to the engines that eventually did lead to
(37:46):
the design of a different kind of lawnmowers. So instead
of that horizontal axis cylindrical approach in which the blades
would rotate around that horizontal axis, the internal combustion engine
al out for a lawnmower with a vertical act soul
upon which you would fix a horizontal blade, So the
rotating vertical axle would rotate this horizontal blade close to
(38:08):
the ground in a really fast circle, and you've got
your rotary lawnmower. A lot of different engineers and companies
experimented with creating rotary lawnmowers for a few decades actually,
but most of them weren't really that successful because the
engines being used. Just weren't up to turning something that
(38:29):
way in an efficient manner, so you couldn't cut very
well with them. But by the nineteen fifties it had
become a viable approach to lawnmower design. And now we're
going to get into some interesting and some upsetting parts
of history. Okay, So we laid out how the aristocracy
used lawns as a way to show off their wealth
(38:50):
and their sensibilities, and we talked about how those ideas
filtered from France and England to America and how Frank
Scott promoted them with his authoritative approach on appealing to
wealthy suburban families. So let's talk about some big issues
in the United States that made lawns a sort of
symbol of the halves versus the have nots. And this
(39:12):
is also going to have a lot to do about
racial discrimination. Back in eighteen seventy when Scott's book hit
the scene, his target demographic was the white suburban homeowner.
The suburbs were where you typically find the upper middle
class or maybe the lower upper classes, and these communities
were predominantly white, and frequently that was actually a selling
(39:36):
point that real estate agents would market to potential clients.
It was, without a doubt, a racist perspective, the idea
that the community is preferable because there are no people
of color living there. That's just gross, alright. So flash
forward to the nineteen forties. The United States enters World
War Two and sends more than sixteen million Americans to serve.
(40:00):
During the war, more than four hundred thousand of those
Americans died in action and another six hundred seventy thousand
were wounded. At the time, racial segregation was still very
much in practice even in the military, and the number
of black people serving in the US military actually represented
a lower percentage than the demographics of black people relatives
(40:24):
to the general US population at the time, But there
were still thousands of black soldiers and volunteers who were
active in the theater of war, including soldiers on the
front lines. Back home, the United States government passed the
Servicemen's Readjustment Act of nineteen forty four, better known as
(40:44):
the g I Bill. The purpose of the bill was
to create a support system for soldiers returning home that
included important infrastructure like the construction of hospitals, but it
also included the chance to go to college tuition free
up to five dollars, which, hey, how about those college
tuition increases, y'all. They could also secure low interest mortgage
(41:08):
authors on homes through banks because the government was backing
those loans. So these soldiers, some of whom had been
overseas for years, were to be given some assistance upon
returning home to make up for the fact that they
had to leave their lives, their loved ones, and their
livelihoods all behind. And that bill meant that millions of
(41:28):
returning soldiers would be able to buy a home for
the first time in the suburbs and follow the American
dream of a white picket fence and a well manicured lawn.
That is, they could do it if they were white.
While the bill ostensibly offered benefits to all returning veterans,
regardless of race or gender, in practice it was far
(41:51):
more common to see those benefits go to white male veterans,
and black veterans also frequently found it really hard to
secure a loan from a bank for a mortgage, even
with the guaranteed government backing that came from the g
I Bill, and so the suburban home and along with it,
the American lawn became sort of an extended marker for
(42:14):
segregation and racial discrimination. Now, did this mean that all
white people who enjoyed maintaining their lawn were racist for
doing so, No, of course not. Rather, they were privileged
and that they had more opportunities to secure a home
in the suburbs and a lawn to maintain than people
(42:35):
of color had. And that's also to point out that
there were black people moving into suburbs and having lawns,
but from a systematic point of view, they were doing
so by overcoming obstacles that their white neighbors just didn't
necessarily face. The post World War two era saw an
economic boom, and along with developments like color printing, radio, television,
(43:01):
we also saw a boom in advertising. And you better
believe companies that were making lawn care products and machinery,
including lawnmowers, were leaning heavily on promoting the idea that
a neat, orderly lawn reflects well on homeowners and that
the products they were selling would help you achieve that
(43:21):
dream of homogeneous perfection that plays a pardon it too.
The US in the nineteen fifties was an era of conformity.
There was an intense pressure to create the ideal of perfection. Honestly,
when we look at stuff like how people will manufacture
these perfect photos for their social media platforms like their Instagram,
(43:43):
to me, it feels like it's that same mentality coming
back into play. Sure, your life might be a shambles,
but dang it, your lawn looks nice, and so to
the outside world, you're just fine. Now, maybe I'm getting
a bit too off target here. Let's get back to lawnmowers.
So by the nineteen fifties we started seeing the rotary
style lawnmowers that ran on gas hitting the market. This
(44:06):
is where we get that iconic starter chord, the pull
chord that can foil us as we try to get
that little bit of fuel that's been pumped into the
engine to catch on before giving that that chord a
big rip or three to try and get the engine
to start. And I don't think I've ever talked about
how a poll start or rope start engine works. So
(44:28):
let's just cover that super quickly, shall we. All Right,
So inside the lawnmower, you've got a reel, and you've
got a chord wound around that reel. The end of
that chord is attached to a handle that's on the
outside the lawnmower. That's the part that you grip and pull.
Attached to the real inside the lawnmower is a spring,
(44:49):
So pulling the cord will cause the spring to extend
and it wants to contract, so that's the force you're feeling.
The tension you feel is the spring trying to contract
a ina so when you let go of the cord,
it goes back into the you know, the lawnmower because
that spring is compressing well. Also attached to the reel
is the clutch of the engine, and as the real turns,
(45:13):
it transmits rotational energy to the crank shaft. If the
crank shaft turns quickly enough, a pair of magnets connected
to a flywheel begin to move outward due to centrifugal force,
and once they extend far enough, the magnets affect the
ignition module so that it generates a spark and that
sets off the combustion in the engine's cylinders, and once
(45:36):
that gets going, the engine can take over from there.
It can continue that cycle of sparking the spark plugs,
assuming that there's fuel left in the tank to ignite
due to those sparks. So a gas powered rotary lawnmower
typically uses the engine to provide power to the blade,
of course, but also frequently to at least two wheels
(45:57):
to make it a little easier to push around. They
require less physical effort to use than the mechanical lawnmowers
that have been around for more than a century, but
they also require fuel and they also give off emissions
through the burning of that fuel. Now, some folks have
been calling out lawns more recently for lots of different reasons,
including environmental and socioeconomic concerns. A lot of water is
(46:21):
used on lawns, which often can be seen as as
very wasteful, and there's always stories about communities that have
water restrictions due to drought and some jerk faces using
precious water to water their lawn because for some reason
that's more important than everyone else having access to water. Uh.
Some folks use stuff like herbicides and pesticides in order
(46:44):
to maintain their lawns, which can sometimes cause chemical runoff
that can get washed out and join the water cycle.
That's bad news. And of course there's the fact that
lawns are not natural ecosystems, they represent a less biologically
useful surface. And then the fact that the very concept
of lawns dates back to this aristocratic notion of showing
(47:05):
off your wealth. So might we one day see a
world in which the manicured lawn is really an oddity
and people move to maybe a more natural and thus
disorderly approach. I don't know, but I sure hope so,
because then my h O A won't be on my
case if I don't get to the grass cutting on time. Okay, well,
I guess I need to go mow the lawn, So
(47:26):
let's wrap this episode up. If you guys have suggestions
for topics I can cover in future episodes of tech Stuff,
please reach out to me. The best way to do
so is on Twitter. To handle is text stuff H
s W and I'll talk to you again really soon.
(47:47):
Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more
podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
You
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and the Love all Things Tech, And while I've been
recording shows from my home for nearly a year now,
(00:27):
I still occasionally get reminded about how things can be
different from when I was working in the office. For
the most part, things are kind of like this is
this is the normal now. However, at the office, there
is no chance that my dog will be barking in
the background while I record, and so far, I think
I've mostly avoided having him show up on episodes of
(00:51):
Tech Stuff, but only because I've edited around it. Keep
telling him if he wants to be on a show,
he should get his own podcast, But I'm also scared
that if he does that, he'll get way more popular
than me. You're also not likely to hear other extraneous
noises at the office because there are studios are recording
studios are all in rooms that don't have a window
(01:11):
to the outside world built into them, though you can
still occasionally pick up sounds of folks who are chatting
in the office outside the studios because well, at least
in the office, we used to be a pretty chatty lot.
So if you listen to any of the stuff shows,
if you listen very carefully, you might occasionally hear the
sounds of people talking outside that studio room. That's because
(01:37):
there are desks and stuff just on the other side
of those doors. But one noise that has been a
particular issue for me while working at home has been
the sound of the landscape crew that's working on the
courtyard outside the townhouse I live in. They always seem
to show up just as I'm getting ready to record.
(01:58):
And then I thought, hey, how about I talk about
the history of lawnmowers and how they work. That could
be a great topic and turn that frustration I feel
into an episode. So let's begin with some etymology, which
I am now being told is not the study of bugs,
but rather the origin of words. So we think of
(02:21):
a lawn, you know, as a grassy area like a yard,
typically covered by turf grass in fact, and that is
somewhat kept in an orderly fashion, partly by cutting the
grass fairly low. But where does the word lawn come from? Well,
the word derives from a Middle English word of lander,
(02:42):
meaning an unwitted field or an open space in the
woods like a glade. Thanks Miriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. Now
y'all might know back in my college days, I studied
medieval literature, including Old and Middle English nexts and so
immediately I thought of our old pal Jeffrey Chaucer, known
(03:05):
for composing the Canterbury Tales, though then he thoughtlessly went
off and died before he finished writing them. But he
also wrote a poem called Parliament of Fouls that mentions
a Lawnda, which, hey, that poem also references Valentine's Day
later on, and since we just had Valentine's Day, this
episode is now timely. So the whole poem is far
(03:28):
too long for me to read. It's like seven lines long,
but I will give you the little bit of it
that's about the LAWNDA. And the passage goes like this,
and then a lawanda upon the Hilla of Flores was set.
This noble goddess Natier of branches were here Harlis and
her bores. He wrought after haircraft, and here measure. Now
(03:49):
this passage goes on a bit longer, but honestly, I
would just be indulging my own love of medieval English lit.
So I'm going to cut it off there. What that
passage means in modern English is and in an opening
in the woods, on a hill covered with flowers sat
the goddess Nature. Her home was made of branches and
arranged according to her art. So it's a pretty little passage.
(04:13):
And here Londa refers to something you might encounter if
you were walking through the countryside, through the wooded forests
of old England or old France, and then at one
point you encounter an opening in the forest where there
aren't any trees. So how did it come to mean
(04:34):
the word lawn that we use today? Well, to understand
that we have to talk about war. Yes, just as
many a homeowner has suspected lawn care and warfare go
hand in hand. Okay, So you got your big medieval
big wig types. You know, you've got your kings and
(04:55):
your lords and your earls and whatnot. And occasionally these
types would lead large groups of warriors to conquer other
medieval big wig types, something like, hey, those guys over
there got it pretty good, So why don't we go
over there and take their stuff and make it our stuff?
(05:15):
And so the world turns upon such thoughts. But it's
not enough to conquer the people who live on the
other side of the hills or river or ocean or whatever.
You got to hold on to the land that you've claimed, right,
and that means creating fortifications, preferably in places where you
can get a pretty good look at your surroundings to
(05:37):
make sure no other medieval big wigs get the same
bright idea you got. And then they come to take
your stuff and it used to be someone else's stuff,
because you know there's always a bigger fish, as it were,
So you build up your forts, or your castles as
it were, to protect your assets. Your castles are your
defense system where you can pull back if necessary if
(05:59):
it am he's come to call. But you can't really
be on the lookout for the next bully if you
can't see the armies for the trees, right, and so
it gets to chopping. You chop, chop, chop all those
trees down around your fortifications so that you can see
folks from a long way off if they're approaching, and
you can prepare if there's an imminent attack. It also
helps if you know you don't leave trees around for
(06:21):
people to cut down and turn into stuff like battering ramps,
So there's that element as well. So rather than wooded fields,
you have grassy ones. And this is the origin of
the lawn though back in those days the lawns weren't
exactly you know, pristine, So to maintain the lawns, you'd
either have livestock go out to the fields to graze,
(06:42):
thus cutting back the grass by eating it, as well
as fertilizing the land on occasion, you know, when nature called,
or you could have laborers go out to the fields
with hand tools like scythes and sickles to cut back
the grass manually so that it wasn't too high. A
sickle is a handheld tool that has a handle, typically
(07:05):
made out of wood, and on the business end, you've
got a curved blade sticking out from the handle, making
kind of like a almost like a half moon, you know,
sort of crescent shaped, and the blade is also typically
at an angle relative to the handles, sort of how
a razor has an angle to it for the purposes
(07:25):
of shaving aside is similar, but it's much larger. It's
a two handed tool. The grim Reaper carries a scythe
and cutting with either a sickle or a side involves
making horizontal passes, typically at the base of the grass,
and you cut in an arc from one side to
(07:45):
the other and big arcing swings so semicircular swings, and
those swings only go in one direction. The blade is
is sharpened on the inside curve, not the outside curve,
and you're typically going right left because the handle for
the forward hand on a scythe is meant to be
held with the right hand. The left hand is meant
(08:07):
to hold the scythe further back on the on the handle,
so in other words, this is yet another right handed tool.
Scything can actually be pretty efficient. There are actually there's
some great videos on YouTube of people who have really
gotten skilled with scything and they can make short work
of an overgrown lawn like they can cut that stuff
(08:29):
down quickly. I suggest you check it out. It's just
neat to watch. And the angle of the blade determines
how short the scythe will cut the grass. Using a
scythe with a good blade angle, a skilled wheelder can
cut the grass very low and pretty efficiently too, and
you would have the bottom part of the blade actually
(08:50):
making contact with the ground as you swing the scythe
from right to left. They also tend to have to
rake up the yard after were to gather up all
the trimmings. Were usually looking at fields that have, you know,
grass that's quite high, like maybe a foot high or
maybe taller, so you need to have something to to
(09:12):
rake up all the clippings that you've left behind. I've
seen a lot of videos of folks using sides in
order to cut back on, you know, relying on fossil
fuels and to make use of the trimmings in various ways,
from compost to making hay while the sun shines. In
some videos, I've seen folks use scythes more effectively than
someone who is using a mechanical push mower or a
(09:35):
weed whacker, though power mowers do tend to be more
efficient than a scythe. So a push mower, like a
mechanical one where there's no motor, it's just from human
power that versus a scythe, you might actually see someone
be more effective with the side than with the push mower.
(09:56):
Weed whackers same thing, uh, the push mower that has
a motor are on it. Those tend to win out
in the end, so it really does start to make
you wonder, however, why the heck did anyone think to
invent the mechanical lawnmower in the first place. If a
scythe can be as efficient, why would anyone ever think
about making a mechanical invention that does effectively the same
(10:21):
sort of thing. The first lawnmowers were purely mechanical, relying
on gears and blades that were mounted on a drum
like cylinder. And if those aren't more efficient than a scythe,
why would you bother? And the answer is drumroll please vanity. See.
While in the medieval era, soldiers wanted to get a
(10:42):
good view of what might be coming at them throughout Europe,
particularly in France and England, the strategic usefulness of castle's
gradually declined in the Middle Ages, largely because of advancements
in artillery. Cannons could make very short work of castle
walls and so warfare began to change and castles weren't
(11:03):
part of that. But you still had all these hoity
toity types who liked the idea of a well maintained lawn, again,
mostly in France and England. That's really where this idea
took hold, and this was definitely an issue of vanity,
particularly when it came to showing off your prestige. Lawns
are not natural environments when you get down to it,
(11:25):
they can be environmentally unfriendly. They represent a much more
limited biome than a natural grassy or wooded area. It's
an artificial construct. It's really an example of humans cutting
back nature to suit our own esthetics. And really it
was only the hoity toity types doing this, because maintaining
a lawn was a lot of work. Not that the
(11:47):
hoity toity types were the ones doing the work, mind you,
but they were the ones who could afford livestock or
laborers who would trend back stuff for them. So from
mannor houses to abbittant castles you had the practice of
maintaining these large grassy areas. Now, some of that sensibility
would also find its way over to the New World
(12:09):
where it really took hold. Now, the grasses in the
New World were different than those found in Europe. But
when settlers came to North America, they brought with them livestock,
and apparently the livestock really liked the grass in America
so much so that they ding dang durnate at all.
So to keep the livestock from starving, the colonists were
(12:30):
importing grass seeds from Europe and North Africa, including grasses that,
if you were to go by their names, sound like
they come from America. Kentucky blue grass, I'm looking at you,
You ain't from Kentucky. Thomas Jefferson was said to have
taken up the goal of creating a manicured lawn at
Monticello after he visited France, and George Washington had a
(12:53):
similar desire to turn his estate of Mountain Vernon into
a mirror of European standards. And certainly the d of
a well kept lawn managed to really take hold in America,
becoming something of an obsession really, which will cover a
little bit later in this episode, and certain sports definitely
helped things along, for which we can largely thank the Scots.
(13:14):
Scottish sports like golf and lawn bowling were brought over
by Scottish immigrants to America and they became popular past
times for those who had the leisure to pursue such things.
But to play lawn games, you gotta cut the grass,
otherwise you're gonna spend more time trying to find the
game equipment than you get to play with the darn things.
Now we're gonna come back to the evolution of the lawn,
(13:36):
particularly in America, and just a little bit as that
history ties into a lot of other interesting stuff and
includes some heavy duty connections to other elements of American
society in addition to feeding an entire industry dedicated to
lawn care and maintenance. But let's get back to our
early history of lawn mowers. Okay, So, by the nineteenth century,
(13:58):
lawns were the rage and in land France and starting
to be in America. But as I said, unless you
had livestock or the cash to pay laborers, you probably
couldn't maintain a lawn on your own. You certainly couldn't
do so to the immaculate standards of the aristocracy. The
wealthy would spend a lot to get that perfect lawn,
(14:19):
even going so far as to hire people to use
handheld shears to cut grass down quite low and to
avoid the patterns that you would see if you used scythes,
because cutting grass and those arc swings would leave behind
patterns in the grass, and that was considered aesthetically unpleasing.
And then we come to an Englishman named Edwin Beard
(14:41):
Budding born in Stroud, Gloucestershire. In Budding started off with
some strikes against him. His parents were unmarried, his father
a farmer, and in England, that put him at a
fairly low social standing. Class in England was a very
important concept still, and b while over there the whole
(15:03):
working class versus posh and all that sort of stuff.
So he started off in carpentry, but he switched over
to working at iron foundries. The Industrial Revolution was well
underway in England at this point and the demand for
iron tools and machinery was very high, and through experience,
Budding built up an understanding of engineering and problem solving.
(15:25):
He would end up inventing several things or making his
own version of some existing machines, but obviously the one
we want to really look at is the lawnmower. Budding
got the idea for the lawnmower when he saw a
device used by textile mills to trim back the fibers
that stick out from the surface of cloth, also known
as the nap of a cloth, and with some textiles
(15:49):
the goal is to fluff the nap out, use little
combs or or prickly flowers even to pull some of
those threads out, and then you comb it a certain way,
which can make the cloth softer to the touch and
better at doing stuff like trapping heat. But sometimes you
just wanted a very smooth piece of cloth, something that
wouldn't get caught easily on rough surfaces. So, for example,
(16:13):
you might want a carpet that could withstand more use
as long as it did you know, catch on shoes
and stuff. So you would want to shear the nap.
You'd want to cut that nap close to the cloth,
And in earlier days this job was done by skilled
tradespeople who would use giant sets of shears, I mean,
these things were massive in order to cut the nap
(16:34):
off the surface of the cloths as efficiently as possible.
But by Butting's time, some genius whose name is lost
to history came up with the notion of building a
mechanical device that has blades arranged around a drum or
cylinder in a type of helix shape. The drum or
cylinder rotates, and by running the surface of the cloth
(16:57):
near this helix of blades, the blade could trim back
the nap on the surface of the cloth. Add in
some rollers and some other elements to pull the cloth along,
and you've got yourself a machine that can trim the
nap back on cloth evenly, consistently, and efficiently. Ah ha,
said Budding. What if I took that same basic idea
(17:18):
and flipped it around a bit, so you could trim
back grass with rotating blades along a cylinder, And in
eight thirty that's just what he did, securing a patent
number six zero eight one in fact for his invention.
I'll explain more about it after this quick break. Budding
(17:42):
saw an opportunity to create a device that could consistently
and reliably cut grass a specific length, so, in other words,
you could adjust how tall the grass would be and
without leaving those marks behind that you would get if
you were to cut grass with scythes and such. Also,
the lawnmower wooden poop on the lawn. Unlike livestock. It
(18:05):
would be particularly handy for parks and sporting grounds where
the well to do could gather for their leisure time
and look for something, you know, orderly and neat, which
very much fit in with the sensibilities of the elite
of nineteenth century Britain. So Edwin Beard Butting built a
wheeled machine out of rought and cast iron. Had a
(18:27):
pair of wheels. It also had a pair of rollers,
and a forward roller and a back roller, uh, as
well as the blade mounted cylinder that did the actual cutting.
So imagine you've got a mechanical device has a small
roller in the front. This is the thing that can
be adjusted so you can control how close to the
ground you're cutting the grass. Behind that roller, you've got
(18:50):
your horizontal cylinder that's got the curved blades arranged in
a helix around that rotatble cylinder, so it rotates along
the horizontal axis, is what I'm saying. To either side
of that are the wheels of the lawnmower. That provides stability,
allows you to actually aim it and push it along
(19:10):
the ground. And then in the rear you have a
big roller. It kind of looks like a more narrow
and slightly smaller version of a steam roller, if that
helps you imagine this. Buttons design also incorporated a tray
to catch grass clippings. The tray was in the front
because the way this machine worked, it would propel the
(19:32):
clippings out, shooting them out towards the front of the machine.
That way, you wouldn't have to follow behind the lawnmower
with a rake or something like that to to rake
up the clippings. And it was that rear roller, the
big steam roller type thing in the back that connected
to the bladed cylinder through a gear drive. That's where
(19:55):
you've got a series of gears that fit together to
transfer the rotational motion of the roller that's pressed against
the ground. So as you push the lawnmower forward, the
roller rolls because it's making contact with the ground, and
it transfers that rotational motion to the cylinder or the
(20:16):
drama if you prefer, that's got the blades on it.
And all of this was made out of iron. Now
this meant the person who was pushing the mower had
to use a pretty good amount of force because you
weren't just pushing hard enough to move the mower itself,
which being made out of iron, was pretty darn heavy,
but also to power that drive train of gears that
(20:38):
would you know, transmit the rotation to the cylinder. And
each step of that process, each gear connection means that
you're losing a little bit of the amount of energy
you're giving to the system to stuff like friction, So
it means you have to push even harder to get
things going. But still, Budding showed that the same general
principle that worked for cutting back the nap on cloth
(21:01):
could in fact be used to cut grass. He patented
his design in eighteen thirty, and in that patent Budding
said his invention represented quote a new combination and application
of machinery for the purpose of cropping or sharing the
vegetable surfaces of lawns, grass plats and pleasure grounds. Country
gentlemen may find and using my machine themselves, and amusing
(21:24):
useful and healthy exercise end quote. It's interesting to note
that a lot of the basic designs introduced by Budding
would stick around throughout the ages with mechanical push mowers,
and the ones that we have today have at least
some resemblance to the one that Budding was making back
in the mid nineteenth century. Now they the new ones
(21:46):
are are more elegant in design, and they're made of
much lighter materials, but the general principle behind the operation
remains pretty much the same. Budding formed a partnership with
an engineer named John Farrabee, who owned a company called
Phoenix iron Works. Fairby had the manufacturing rights to produce
Buddings design and fronted the costs to develop the prototype,
(22:10):
and one of the earliest lawnmowers that the pair produced
went to the London Zoo and another one became the
property of Oxford University. By eighteen thirty two, word had
already spread that Buddings machine could create great results, and
demand was soon outpacing Farraby's capacity to produce lawnmowers, and
(22:32):
Fairby then began to license the design to other engineers
to other iron works owners, including Ransoms of Ipswich, a
company that was already in the business of producing plows
for farmers. They advertised the new lawnmower invention saying, quote
the machine is so easy to manage that persons unpracticed
(22:53):
in the art of mowing may cut the grass on
lawns and bowling greens with ease end quote and the words.
They were kind of positioning this as something of a
leisure activity for uh, for the upper class, that you know,
mowing the lawn with a side that was a low
(23:14):
class thing to do that was for laborers. You wouldn't
see people of the upper classes do that. It was
beneath their station. But mowing with this exotic machine that
was something befitting a person of high station. And it was,
as a matter of fact, pretty simple to operate these things.
You just grabbed the handle of the mower and you
(23:35):
pushed it forward, kind of like a cart. You would
exert a little bit of a downward push as you did.
So it took far less skilled than scything did. And
by framing the activity of mowing a lawn as a
means of taking exercise and being out in nature, the
companies were slowly shifting the perception of caring for a
lawn in general. And this would also help later on
(23:57):
as the lawn mower would be marketed towards the middle class,
when the prices would eventually come down. Now, when I
say the demand was outstripping supply, we have to remember
that manufacturing in the eighteen thirties wasn't nearly as efficient
as it would be a century later. So I don't
want to give you the impression that the lawnmower became
(24:19):
the must have Christmas gift of eighteen thirty two. Or something.
When Budding passed away in eighteen forty six because of
a stroke. The lawnmower was a successful invention, but it
was not yet a household item, so it wasn't like
Budding had become a millionaire. In fact, he died before
(24:39):
really seeing his invention get adopted around England, France, and America.
By the eighteen sixties, Farrabees Iron Works had produced around
five thousand lawnmowers, and that included a small range of
designs which mainly had to do with the width of
the lawnmower. A wider lawnmower can obviously cut a wider
(25:02):
strip of grass, which means you don't have to do
as many passes on a lawn or a field in
order to complete a job, but it also means that
the lawnmower gets heavier. Some of the designs incorporated a
second handle on the lawnmower. This one would be toward
the front of the machine, which meant you could actually
pull it along behind you instead of pushing it in
(25:25):
front of you. One design I saw had the handle
on a hinge so you could swing the handle so
you could swing it toward the rear of the machine.
And make it a push mower, or you could swing
it to the front of the machine and make it
a pull mower. Buttings design inspired others to make their
own adjustments. In eighteen forty two, Alexander Shanks, an inventor
(25:47):
from Scotland, made a version of the lawnmower that could
be hitched to a horse or pony, which allowed him
to make even larger lawnmowers that would be far too
heavy for a person to push or pull on their own.
To prevent the horses from damaging the grass. Let's say
that you're cutting the grass on a golf course, something
that was very common in Scotland or tennis courts. Well,
(26:10):
they would put little leather shoes on the horses hoofs,
so the horse would be wearing booties in order to
mow the lawn. In the eighteen fifties, inventor Thomas Green
made some adjustments of his own to the lawnmower design,
and one simple tweak was that he added a rake
to help lift grass blades up a little bit for cutting,
(26:30):
so that way you didn't end up with any missed bits.
But in the late eighteen fifties he made a much
more substantial change. He created a chain drive for the
mower's blades instead of the gear drive that Budding had created,
and by removing the need for so many cast iron
gears and replacing them with a chain, he made the
(26:51):
lawnmowers design simpler and importantly lighter. It was also apparently
less noisy, as Green called is lawnmower the Sileon's messar
for silent running. By this time, thirty years after the
invention of the lawnmower, word had reached America, and in
eighteen sixty eight an inventor from Connecticut named Amariah Hills
(27:15):
received a patent for improvements to Budding's lawnmower design, which
included changing out a cylinder covered in blades to an
open spiral cutter. So just imagine a helix of blades,
but you no longer have the mounted on a cylinder.
It's almost like it's just two blades. And that that
(27:36):
mount two wheels on either side that can turn. Uh.
He also allowed more fine tuning for the cutting height
and changed how the handle attached to the frame of
the mower, and his design would go on to become
a very popular mower in the northeastern United states, sometimes
called an archimedian mower because the blades resembled the classic
(27:56):
archimedian screw. Many of these machines saw you in parks
and for maintaining stuff like golf courses and tennis courts
and the like. But over in America they would also
be sought after because of a few other big factors,
and one is the growth of the suburbs. So, after
the Civil War in America and as the US was
having its own boom in industry, cities were becoming more
(28:20):
industrialized in general, and many people, at least many wealthy people,
the people who could afford it, moved out of the
cities and settled in surrounding areas near the cities, forming
the suburbs. And like the French and English aristocracy a
century earlier, many of them saw a well maintained lawn
as something of a status symbol. So there was a
(28:42):
general movement toward cutting lawns, which must have pleased Amiah
Hill as it represented a demand for those Archimedean mowers.
And in eighteen seventy, Frank J. Scott's The Art of
Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds of Small Extent hit the presses.
This book, which is six d eighteen pages in length,
(29:06):
if we don't include all the advertisements. At the end
of the book, it goes to what I can only
describe as excruciating detail regarding how to make your lawn
look absolutely magnificent, and further, you are a monster if
you don't do it. You can read the whole thing
(29:26):
over on the Smithsonian Libraries website if you would like.
If you want to skip to the juicy stuff, go
to page one, D seven, Chapter thirteen, The Lawn. The
chapter opens up with a couple of references to poetry,
followed by this passage quote, A smooth, closely shaven surface
of grass is by far the most essential element of
(29:48):
beauty on the grounds of a suburban home. End quote boom,
mic drop. You don't mow your grass, you are an
affront to beauty. Now I'm being a little, you know,
facetious here, but Scott was arguing that in an age
in which companies were laying down train tracks or street
(30:09):
car lines more people from far and wide, we're passing
through different neighborhoods and then judging those neighborhoods based on
their aesthetic beauty or lack thereof, and isn't it more
American to be proud of your community and to show
it off with distinction. So rich suburbanites ate that stuff
up man and so lawn care started to be a
(30:32):
big business. It was boosted more with related inventions such
as Joseph Lessler's lawn sprinkler, which could attach to a
garden hose. Lawns need a good deal of water to
remain healthy. That's what kind of touch on that again
in a bit. And this was a way where you
could water your lawn without having to do a lot
of backbreaking work in the process. And again, the concept
(30:54):
of lawn care being connected to exercise and being out
of doors was a big part of all this too.
So while America's obsession with lawn care began to take root,
so to speak, we had other stuff going on at
the same time. Sometime around or so, inventors began to
incorporate the next logical element for lawnmowers steam engines. Yes,
(31:18):
steam powered lawnmowers were a thing briefly, and why not.
Steam engines had already been used for trains for decades,
so why not strap a big old boiler to a
mechanical lawnmower. And make the boiling water do all the work.
So here's how these things worked. In general. You had
your boiler, which is the name suggests, is the container
(31:39):
holding the water that gets boiled off to produce steam.
The boiler is pressurized so the steam can't just escape
and has to go through a specific route. And typically
you would have a valve that would allow steam to
pass through under really incredible pressure. So a furnace heats
the boiler up, the water starts to boil off, and
(32:00):
the steam builds up and passes through valves to a
cylinder that has a piston in it. The steam forces
the piston down the length of the cylinder until the
piston passes an exhaust valve, whereupon the steam escapes the cylinder,
the piston returns to its starting position, and the whole
thing can happen again. Attaching mechanical elements to the piston
(32:23):
via a piston rod allows you to transfer that mechanical
motion to other components such as the wheels and the
cutting blades of a lawnmower. And bang, now you don't
have to push it yourself or hitch it to a
horse or something. You just gotta fill up the boiler
from time to time. You gotta keep that furnace going
and keep it really hot, and you know, you just
(32:43):
gotta not explode, which is something that can happen if
pressure builds up in a boiler and the steam has
nowhere to go. But hey, a boiler explosion is a
small price to pay for a well manicured lawn. Right. Okay,
I'm clearly getting snow archy again. But these lawnmowers did work,
and I've seen some that look like the results you
(33:04):
would get if you crossed a locomotive with a mechanical
push mower along with a riding lawnmower. You would sit
in front of the boiler, which would be mounted at
the rear of the lawnmower, and you would use controls
to steer yourself as you rode along and moved down
a lawn or field, and the steam engine provides all
the two wheels and the blades. It's neat, if a
(33:27):
little intimidating. These things were huge, and they had to
be because if you're using steam, you need to have
a big boiler to hold enough water so that you've
got the the mp for your your engine. These clearly
were not intended for the average homeowner or even the
upper middle class or lower upper class homeowners. These were
(33:47):
more for you know, larger, more regularly level areas. They
didn't do well if there were hills or anything like that,
so these were more frequently used for something like a
a flat land, endscaped park, or you know, a sporting
area like a golf course or maybe a tennis court.
(34:07):
They also didn't stick around for very long. And when
we come back, I'll talk about the development of the
gas powered lawnmower, which would take the steam out of
its predecessor for a couple of good reasons. But first
let's take another quick break. Before I get into more
(34:31):
modern mowers, I should mention another inventor, this one named
John Albert Burr. He made changes to the classic cylindrical
lawnmower design so that the gears wouldn't easily get gummed
up with lawn clippings. Essentially, they figured out, hey, if
we cover these gears up so that the lawn clippings
can't get in the gearworks, then you're not gonna have
(34:52):
as many jams as you try and mow your lawn.
He also created a mower that would allow landscapers to
mow more closely to the edge of walls and buildings
to get a neater cut. Also, around this time, improvements
in manufacturing meant that companies could mass produce lawnmowers, which
also meant the costs of production dropped, and that meant
(35:14):
companies could drop the prices of those machines, and that
meant more people were able to afford lawnmowers, and in
American particular, that meant booming business. As the idea that
a well kept lawn was an important component of being
seen as an upstanding member of society it had really
taken hold here. So this combination of elements led to
(35:36):
a lot more people buying lawnmowers. And when I say that,
remember I'm still talking about the mechanical push mower style devices. Well,
the steam powered lawnmowers appeared on the scene in the
eighteen nineties, but by nineteen o two, Ransoms, the company
I mentioned much earlier in this episode as one of
the first to license Budding's lawnmower design for production, Well,
(35:59):
they created the first lawnmower that used an internal combustion
engine for power. This was a ride on mower and
it was a big one. So this was not a
push mower. This this was a gigantic monstrosity. In fact,
the images I've seen of this thing make it look
like there's a gentleman in a jacket and tweed hat
(36:20):
who is taking a printing press out for a ride
or something. It's a machine with big, heavy chains, enormous rollers,
a large container in front to catch clippings, and whirling
blades of destruction underneath. It looks pretty awesome, I think,
and almost unreal. It certainly isn't what I think of
when someone says lawn mower to me. The internal combustion
(36:42):
engine was the death knell for steam powered lawnmowers. While
Ransom's ride on mower was huge, the switch to an
internal combustion engine would lead to smaller lawnmower designs. And
you didn't need an enormous boiler like you would with
a steam powered one, nor did you have to stoke
some sort of furnace to keep things going. You just
(37:05):
needed some petrol in the fuel tank. Now, I've talked
about how internal combustion engines work and other episodes, so
I'm not going to go into all that detail here,
but I will say that the early versions of the
motor powered lawn mowers really in other forms, seemed to
be based on that cylindrical helix design along the horizontal axis,
(37:25):
the same sort of design that Budding had proposed way
back in eighteen thirty. So these were not the rotary
mowers that we would see much later, not yet, but
the advances in internal combustion engines, which would both make
the mowers get smaller and more powerful as various engineers
made improvements to the engines that eventually did lead to
(37:46):
the design of a different kind of lawnmowers. So instead
of that horizontal axis cylindrical approach in which the blades
would rotate around that horizontal axis, the internal combustion engine
al out for a lawnmower with a vertical act soul
upon which you would fix a horizontal blade, So the
rotating vertical axle would rotate this horizontal blade close to
(38:08):
the ground in a really fast circle, and you've got
your rotary lawnmower. A lot of different engineers and companies
experimented with creating rotary lawnmowers for a few decades actually,
but most of them weren't really that successful because the
engines being used. Just weren't up to turning something that
(38:29):
way in an efficient manner, so you couldn't cut very
well with them. But by the nineteen fifties it had
become a viable approach to lawnmower design. And now we're
going to get into some interesting and some upsetting parts
of history. Okay, So we laid out how the aristocracy
used lawns as a way to show off their wealth
(38:50):
and their sensibilities, and we talked about how those ideas
filtered from France and England to America and how Frank
Scott promoted them with his authoritative approach on appealing to
wealthy suburban families. So let's talk about some big issues
in the United States that made lawns a sort of
symbol of the halves versus the have nots. And this
(39:12):
is also going to have a lot to do about
racial discrimination. Back in eighteen seventy when Scott's book hit
the scene, his target demographic was the white suburban homeowner.
The suburbs were where you typically find the upper middle
class or maybe the lower upper classes, and these communities
were predominantly white, and frequently that was actually a selling
(39:36):
point that real estate agents would market to potential clients.
It was, without a doubt, a racist perspective, the idea
that the community is preferable because there are no people
of color living there. That's just gross, alright. So flash
forward to the nineteen forties. The United States enters World
War Two and sends more than sixteen million Americans to serve.
(40:00):
During the war, more than four hundred thousand of those
Americans died in action and another six hundred seventy thousand
were wounded. At the time, racial segregation was still very
much in practice even in the military, and the number
of black people serving in the US military actually represented
a lower percentage than the demographics of black people relatives
(40:24):
to the general US population at the time, But there
were still thousands of black soldiers and volunteers who were
active in the theater of war, including soldiers on the
front lines. Back home, the United States government passed the
Servicemen's Readjustment Act of nineteen forty four, better known as
(40:44):
the g I Bill. The purpose of the bill was
to create a support system for soldiers returning home that
included important infrastructure like the construction of hospitals, but it
also included the chance to go to college tuition free
up to five dollars, which, hey, how about those college
tuition increases, y'all. They could also secure low interest mortgage
(41:08):
authors on homes through banks because the government was backing
those loans. So these soldiers, some of whom had been
overseas for years, were to be given some assistance upon
returning home to make up for the fact that they
had to leave their lives, their loved ones, and their
livelihoods all behind. And that bill meant that millions of
(41:28):
returning soldiers would be able to buy a home for
the first time in the suburbs and follow the American
dream of a white picket fence and a well manicured lawn.
That is, they could do it if they were white.
While the bill ostensibly offered benefits to all returning veterans,
regardless of race or gender, in practice it was far
(41:51):
more common to see those benefits go to white male veterans,
and black veterans also frequently found it really hard to
secure a loan from a bank for a mortgage, even
with the guaranteed government backing that came from the g
I Bill, and so the suburban home and along with it,
the American lawn became sort of an extended marker for
(42:14):
segregation and racial discrimination. Now, did this mean that all
white people who enjoyed maintaining their lawn were racist for
doing so, No, of course not. Rather, they were privileged
and that they had more opportunities to secure a home
in the suburbs and a lawn to maintain than people
(42:35):
of color had. And that's also to point out that
there were black people moving into suburbs and having lawns,
but from a systematic point of view, they were doing
so by overcoming obstacles that their white neighbors just didn't
necessarily face. The post World War two era saw an
economic boom, and along with developments like color printing, radio, television,
(43:01):
we also saw a boom in advertising. And you better
believe companies that were making lawn care products and machinery,
including lawnmowers, were leaning heavily on promoting the idea that
a neat, orderly lawn reflects well on homeowners and that
the products they were selling would help you achieve that
(43:21):
dream of homogeneous perfection that plays a pardon it too.
The US in the nineteen fifties was an era of conformity.
There was an intense pressure to create the ideal of perfection. Honestly,
when we look at stuff like how people will manufacture
these perfect photos for their social media platforms like their Instagram,
(43:43):
to me, it feels like it's that same mentality coming
back into play. Sure, your life might be a shambles,
but dang it, your lawn looks nice, and so to
the outside world, you're just fine. Now, maybe I'm getting
a bit too off target here. Let's get back to lawnmowers.
So by the nineteen fifties we started seeing the rotary
style lawnmowers that ran on gas hitting the market. This
(44:06):
is where we get that iconic starter chord, the pull
chord that can foil us as we try to get
that little bit of fuel that's been pumped into the
engine to catch on before giving that that chord a
big rip or three to try and get the engine
to start. And I don't think I've ever talked about
how a poll start or rope start engine works. So
(44:28):
let's just cover that super quickly, shall we. All Right,
So inside the lawnmower, you've got a reel, and you've
got a chord wound around that reel. The end of
that chord is attached to a handle that's on the
outside the lawnmower. That's the part that you grip and pull.
Attached to the real inside the lawnmower is a spring,
(44:49):
So pulling the cord will cause the spring to extend
and it wants to contract, so that's the force you're feeling.
The tension you feel is the spring trying to contract
a ina so when you let go of the cord,
it goes back into the you know, the lawnmower because
that spring is compressing well. Also attached to the reel
is the clutch of the engine, and as the real turns,
(45:13):
it transmits rotational energy to the crank shaft. If the
crank shaft turns quickly enough, a pair of magnets connected
to a flywheel begin to move outward due to centrifugal force,
and once they extend far enough, the magnets affect the
ignition module so that it generates a spark and that
sets off the combustion in the engine's cylinders, and once
(45:36):
that gets going, the engine can take over from there.
It can continue that cycle of sparking the spark plugs,
assuming that there's fuel left in the tank to ignite
due to those sparks. So a gas powered rotary lawnmower
typically uses the engine to provide power to the blade,
of course, but also frequently to at least two wheels
(45:57):
to make it a little easier to push around. They
require less physical effort to use than the mechanical lawnmowers
that have been around for more than a century, but
they also require fuel and they also give off emissions
through the burning of that fuel. Now, some folks have
been calling out lawns more recently for lots of different reasons,
including environmental and socioeconomic concerns. A lot of water is
(46:21):
used on lawns, which often can be seen as as
very wasteful, and there's always stories about communities that have
water restrictions due to drought and some jerk faces using
precious water to water their lawn because for some reason
that's more important than everyone else having access to water. Uh.
Some folks use stuff like herbicides and pesticides in order
(46:44):
to maintain their lawns, which can sometimes cause chemical runoff
that can get washed out and join the water cycle.
That's bad news. And of course there's the fact that
lawns are not natural ecosystems, they represent a less biologically
useful surface. And then the fact that the very concept
of lawns dates back to this aristocratic notion of showing
(47:05):
off your wealth. So might we one day see a
world in which the manicured lawn is really an oddity
and people move to maybe a more natural and thus
disorderly approach. I don't know, but I sure hope so,
because then my h O A won't be on my
case if I don't get to the grass cutting on time. Okay, well,
I guess I need to go mow the lawn, So
(47:26):
let's wrap this episode up. If you guys have suggestions
for topics I can cover in future episodes of tech Stuff,
please reach out to me. The best way to do
so is on Twitter. To handle is text stuff H
s W and I'll talk to you again really soon.
(47:47):
Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more
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