Rerun: How Medieval Warfare Led to the Lawnmower

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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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the Tech Area. Well,
I am currently on vacation, although I'll be back tomorrow Tuesday.

(00:28):
I am flying back from New York City today, so
wish me safe travels. But I didn't want to leave
you without an episode, So we're going to listen to
an episode that I recorded in twenty twenty one, and
it was one of the episodes that really tickled me
when I got to work on it. It's called How
Medieval Warfare Lead to the Lawnmower, And it's kind of

(00:53):
a silly title, but you know, it also actually does track.
If it weren't for things like castles, we wouldn't have
lawnmowers and weed whackers. Really, So let's sit back, listen
to this episode from twenty twenty one and enjoy. While
I've been recording shows from my home for nearly a

(01:14):
year now, 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 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

(01:36):
mostly avoided having him show up on episodes of 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 our studios are Recording studios are

(01:58):
all in rooms that don't have a window 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

(02:21):
people talking outside that studio room. That's because 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

(02:44):
just as I'm getting ready to record. 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
be again with some etymology, which I am now being
told is not the study of bugs, but rather the

(03:07):
origin of words. So we think of 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 land, meaning

(03:31):
an unwitted field or an open space in the woods,
like a glade. Thanks Miriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. Now y'all
might know that back in my college days, I studied
medieval literature, including Old and Middle English texts, and so
immediately I thought of our old pal Jeffrey Chaucer, known

(03:54):
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 Fowls that mentions
a landa 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

(04:17):
too long for me to read. It's like seven hundred
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 Hilda of
Flores was set. This Nobla Goddessa natier of branches were here,
Harleis and her Borza. He wrought after haircraft and her measure.

(04:38):
Now 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

(05:00):
pretty little passage. 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

(05:21):
come to mean 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 bigwig types. You know, you got your kings

(05:43):
and your lords and your earls and whatnot. And occasionally
these types would lead large groups of warriors to conquer
other medieval bigwig types, something like a, Hey, those guys
over there got it pretty good, so what don't we
go over there and take their stuff and make it
our stuff? And so the world turns upon such thoughts.

(06:08):
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 make sure no other medieval
big wigs get the same bright idea you got, and

(06:30):
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 enemies come to call.
But you can't really be on the lookout for the

(06:52):
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 people to cut down and turn into stuff like

(07:12):
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, thus cutting back the grass by eating it,

(07:34):
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 made out of wood, and on the

(07:55):
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 of shaving. A scythe is similar, but

(08:17):
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 the other, and big arcing swings,

(08:37):
so semicircular swings, and those swings only go in one direction.
The blade is sharpened on the inside curve, not the
outside curve, and you're typically going right to 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 to hold the scythe further back on

(08:59):
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 down quickly. I suggest you check it out.

(09:21):
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 making contact with the ground as you swing the

(09:42):
scythe from right to left. They also tend to have
to rake up the yard afterward to gather up all
the trimmings. We're usually looking at fields that have, you know,
grass that's quite high, like maybe a foot high or
maybe taller, so need to have something to rake up
all the clippings that you've left behind. I've seen a

(10:05):
lot of videos of folks using sides in order to
cut back on 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 sithes more effectively than someone who is
using a mechanical push mower or a weed whacker, though

(10:26):
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 weed whacker, same thing

(10:46):
the push mower that has a motor 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

(11:08):
does effectively the same 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

(11:29):
medieval era soldiers wanted to get a good view of
what might be coming at them throughout Europe, particularly in
France and England, the strategic usefulness of castles 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 part of that.

(11:52):
But you still had all these hoyity 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, they can

(12:14):
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
hoidy toyty types doing this because maintaining a lawn was
a lot of work. Not that the toy types were

(12:37):
the ones doing the work, mind you, but they were
the ones who could afford livestock or laborers who would
trim back stuff for them. So from manor houses to
inhabited 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 where it really

(12:58):
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 importing grass

(13:20):
seats 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

(13:42):
similar desire to turn his estate of Mountain Vernon into
a mirror of European standards. And certainly the idea 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 for which we can largely thank the Scots. Scottish

(14:03):
sports like golf and lawn bowling were brought over by
Scottish immigrants to America and they became popular pastimes for
those who had the leisure to pursue such things. But
to play lawn games, you gotta cut the grass, otherwise
you're going to spend more time trying to find the
game equipment than you get to play with the darned things.
Now we're going to come back to the evolution of

(14:24):
the lawn, 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

(14:45):
the nineteenth century lawns were the rage in England, 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
certain couldn't do so to the immaculate standards of the aristocracy.
The wealthy would spend a lot to get that perfect lawn,

(15:08):
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 he used sides,
because cutting grass in those arc swings would leave behind
patterns in the grass, and that was considered esthetically unpleasing.
And then we come to an Englishman named Edwin Beard

(15:30):
Budding born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in seventeen ninety five. 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 can be while over there

(15:50):
the whole 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 underweigh 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

(16:12):
problem solving. 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

(16:33):
known as the nap of a cloth, and with some
textiles the goal is to fluff the nap out. You
use little combs 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,

(16:57):
something that wouldn't get caught easily on roughs. So, for example,
you might want a carpet that could withstand more use
as long as it didn't you 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

(17:17):
would use giant sets of shears. I mean, these things
were massive in order to cut the nap off the
surface of the cloth 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

(17:38):
a type of helix shape. The drum or cylinder rotates,
and by running the surface of the cloth near this
helix of blades, the blades 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. Aha, said Budding.

(18:04):
What if I took that same basic idea and flipped
it around a bit, so you could trim back grass
with rotating blades along a cylinder, And in eighteen 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 saw an

(18:32):
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 wouldn't poop on the lawn, unlike livestock. It would

(18:55):
be particularly handy for parks and sporting grounds where the
to do could gather for their leisure time and look
for something orderly and neat, which very much fit in
with the sensibilities of the elite of nineteenth century Britain.
So Edwin Beard Budding built a wheeled machine out of
rot and cast iron. It had a pair of wheels.

(19:18):
It also had a pair of rollers and a forward
roller and a back roller, 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 your horizontal cylinder that's got

(19:42):
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 the ground. And then in the rear

(20:02):
you have a big roller. It kind of looks like
a more narrow and slightly smaller version of a steamroller,
if that helps you imagine. This button's 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 clippings out, shooting them out toward the front

(20:24):
of the machine. That way, you wouldn't have to follow
behind the lawnmower with a rake or something like that
to rake up the clippings. And it was that rear roller,
the big steamroller type thing in the back that connected
to the bladed cylinder through a gear drive. That's where

(20:45):
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 round, and
it transfers that rotational motion to the cylinder or the

(21:06):
dram 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

(21:28):
would 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 could in

(21:50):
fact be used to cut grass. He patented his design
in eighteen thirty, and in that patent Budding said his
invention represented to quote, a new combination an application of
machinery for the purpose of cropping or shearing the vegetable
surfaces of lawns, grass plats and pleasure grounds. Country gentlemen
may find and using my machine themselves, and amusing useful

(22:13):
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 pushmowers, 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 the new ones are more elegant

(22:37):
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. Farreby had
the manufacturing rights to produce Budding's design and fronted the

(22:57):
costs to develop the prototype. 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 Budding's machine could
create great results, and demand was soon outpacing Faraby's capacity.

(23:19):
To produce lawnmowers, and Faraby then began to license the
design to other engineers to other ironworks 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

(23:41):
that persons unpracticed in the art of mowing may cut
the grass on lawns and bowling greens with ease end quote.
In other words, they were kind of positioning this as
something of a leisure activity for the upper class. That
mowing the lawn with a side that was a low

(24:03):
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

(24:24):
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

(24:47):
as the lawn mower would be marketed toward 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

(25:08):
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

(25:29):
really seeing his invention get adopted around England, France and America.
By the eighteen sixties, Farrabe's Ironworks 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 strip of grass,

(25:52):
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

(26:13):
instead of pushing it in 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. Budding's design inspired
others to make their own adjustments. In eighteen forty two,

(26:35):
Alexander Shanks, an inventor 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 were cutting the grass
on a golf course, something that was very common in

(26:57):
Scotland or tennis courts. Well, they would put little leather
shoes on the horse's hoofs, so the horse would be
wearing booties in order to mow the lawn. In the
eighteen fifties, inventor Thomas Greene 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

(27:18):
up a little bit for cutting, so that way you
didn't end up with any mist 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

(27:38):
replacing them with a chain, he made the lawnmowers design
simpler and importantly lighter. It was also apparently less noisy,
as green called his lawnmower the Silen's Messoar for silent running.
By this time, thirty years after the invention of the lawnmower,
word had reached America. In eighteen sixty eight, an inventor

(28:02):
from Connecticut named Amariah Hills 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
them mounted on a cylinder. It's almost like it's just

(28:23):
two blades that mount two wheels on either side that
can turn. 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

(28:45):
classic archimedian screw. Many of these machines saw use 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

(29:05):
having its own boom in industry, cities were becoming more
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

(29:29):
as something of a status symbol. So there was a
general movement toward cutting lawns, which must have pleased Amariah
Hill as it represented a demand for those Archimedean mowers.
And in eighteen seventy Frank J. Scotts, The Art of
Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds of Small Extent hit the presses.

(29:50):
This book, which is six hundred eighteen pages in length
if we don't include all the advertisements at the end
of the book, 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

(30:13):
don't do it. You can read the whole thing over
on the Smithsonian Library's website if you would like. If
you want to skip to the juicy stuff, go to
page one hundred seven, chapter thirteen, The Lawn. The chapter
opens up with a couple of references to poetry, followed
by this passage quote, A smooth, closely shoven surface of

(30:34):
grass is by far the most essential element of 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

(30:55):
in which companies were laying down train tracks or street
car lines, more people from far and wide, we're passing
through different neighborhoods and then judging those neighborhoods based on
their esthetic 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

(31:18):
up man, and so lawn care started to be a
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 we'll kind of touch on that again
in a bit. And this was a way where you

(31:38):
could water your lawn without having to do a lot
of backbreaking work in the process. And again, the concept
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 eighteen ninety or so, inventors

(32:01):
began to incorporate the next logical element for lawnmowers, steam engines. Yes,
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.

(32:23):
So here's how these things worked. In general. You had
your boiler, which is the name suggests, is the container
holding the water that gets boiled off to produce steam.
The boiler is pressurized, so the steam can't just escape.
It 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

(32:46):
the boiler up, the water starts to boil off, and
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 asses an exhaust valve, whereupon the steam escapes the cylinder,
the piston returns to its starting position, and the whole

(33:07):
thing can happen again. Attaching mechanical elements to the piston
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 got to fill up the
boiler from time to time. You got to keep that

(33:30):
furnace going and keep it really hot. And you know,
you just 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 snarky again, But these lawnmowers did work,

(33:51):
and I've seen some that look like the result you
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

(34:13):
the oop to the wheels and the blades. It's neat,
if a 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 oomph for your engine. These clearly
were not intended for the average homeowner, or even the
upper middle class or lower upper class homeowners. These were

(34:37):
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
flat landscaped park, or you know, a sporting area like
a golf course or maybe a tennis court. They also

(34:57):
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 modern mowers, I

(35:22):
should mention another inventor, this one named John Albert Burr.
He made change us 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 going to have as

(35:43):
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 lawn mowers, which
also meant the costs of production dropped, and that meant

(36:04):
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

(36:27):
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 two license Budding's lawnmower design for production, Well,

(36:49):
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 pushmower.
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 who is taking

(37:10):
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 lawnmower.
To me, the internal combustion engine was the death knell

(37:34):
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 needed some petrol in the fuel tank. Now,

(37:57):
I've talked about how internal combustion and 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,
the same sort design that Budding had proposed way back

(38:18):
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 the
design of a different kind of lawnmowers. So instead of

(38:39):
that horizontal axis cylindrical approach in which the blades would
rotate around that horizontal axis, the internal combustion engineal out
for a lawnmower with a vertical axle upon which you
would fix a horizontal blade, So the rotating vertical axle
would rotate this horizontal blade close to the ground in

(39:00):
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 way in an
efficient manner, so you couldn't cut very well with them.

(39:23):
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 and their sensibilities,
and we talked about how those ideas filtered from France

(39:45):
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.
They made lawns a sort of symbol of the halves
versus the half knots. And this is also going to
have a lot to do about racial discrimination. Back in

(40:07):
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 point that real estate

(40:27):
agents would market to potential clients. It was, without a doubt,
a racist perspective, the idea that a community is preferable
because there are no people of color living there. That's
just gross, all right. So flash forward to the nineteen forties.
The United States enters World War Two and sends more
than sixteen million Americans to serve. During the war, more

(40:52):
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 to the general US population

(41:16):
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 the GI Bill. The purpose of the

(41:36):
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 hundred dollars, which, hey, how
about those college tuition increases, y'all. They could also secure

(41:56):
low interest mortgage offers on homes through banks. 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

(42:18):
millions of 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

(42:40):
it was far 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 GI Bill. And so the suburban home
and along with it, the American lawn became sort of

(43:02):
an extended marker for 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

(43:24):
maintain than people 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

(43:47):
color printing, radio television, 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

(44:10):
you achieve that 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, to me, it

(44:33):
feels like it's that same mentality coming back into play. Sure,
your life might be as 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

(44:54):
ran on gas hitting the market. This is where we
get that iconic starter chord, the pull 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 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

(45:16):
rope start engine works. So 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 reel inside the

(45:37):
lawnmower is a spring. 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 again. So when you let
go of the chord, it goes back into the you know,
the lawnmower because that spring is compressing well. Also attached

(45:58):
to the reel is the clutch of the engine, and
as the reel turns, 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

(46:21):
a spark and that sets off the combustion in the
engine's cylinders, and once 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

(46:42):
power to the blade, of course, but also frequently to
at least two wheels 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 learning of that fuel.
Now some folks have been calling out lawns more recently

(47:04):
for lots of different reasons, including environmental and socioeconomic concerns.
A lot of water is used on lawns, which often
can be seen 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

(47:26):
because for some reason that's more important than everyone else
having access to water. Some folks use stuff like herbicides
and pesticides in order 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

(47:50):
that the very concept of lawns dates back to this
aristocratic notion of showing off your wealth. So might we
one day see a world in which the manicured law
on 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
won't be on my case if I don't get to

(48:12):
the grass cutting on time. I hope you enjoyed that
episode from twenty twenty one. It originally published on February fifteenth,
twenty twenty one. That's my work anniversary. I started working
at how Stuff Works on February fifteenth, many many years ago,
and I'm still here. I hope that you are all well.

(48:33):
I will be back for the rest of the week,
so I look forward to chatting with you again really soon.
Text Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen

(48:53):
to your favorite shows.