I used to have quite a small lawn, all of it easily reached from the house. My lawn mower was electric, powered from the mains by a long cable, and this was not only convenient, as there was no need to keep checking the level in my fuel can, but it was also clean. There were no exhaust fumes, no spills, and no tank to run dry at the far end of the garden just five minutes before I’d finished the weekly cut.
Then we moved to a different house. The garden is an unusual shape, there are long stretches of grass that reach far away from the house, and my old electric mower would only reach the far gate with the help of two extension cables. And so, here comes the combustion engine! Now to be fair, I like my Honda Izy mower, and I’m not planning to dispose of it any time soon. However, I do acknowledge that it might not be the most environmentally neutral machine around, and I know that many people feel quite strongly about the atmospheric clean-up agenda.
So what are the choices for those of us who want to move quickly to a cleaner option? Well, firstly, it is important to remember that electric mowers are not completely clean, so let’s not get too purist about this. The lawn mower engine may not be putting out fumes in your garden, but atmospheric emissions were produced in the course of its manufacture, and a power station somewhere pumps out its carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as it generates your electricity, even if it is miles away from where you’re using it.
So what about a manual mower? There’s quite a move back to these nowadays. In addition to their environmental credentials they use up human energy and can contribute to losing some of that undesirable flab. If this is too physically demanding, then electric mowers are the next best for cleanness, but don’t forget the problem of the trailing cables.
This is where modern battery technology comes in. There is now a wide variety of cordless rechargeable electric lawn mowers. The Draper model above has a 24v sealed lead-acid battery, whilst the Bosch machine here has a lithium battery.
Whatever the type of battery, they’re all quieter than petrol-driven mowers. (That might have been helpful last week when I had to stop mowing because a wedding was taking place in the church next door and my lawnmower engine noise was interfering with the happy couple’s special day). They don’t put out fumes, and there’s no liquid refuelling to be done. All you have to do to “refuel” is plug it into the mains when you’ve finished.
Of course there are different sizes, both physical size in terms of the width of cut and also battery capacity, and this last point is important. If you’re buying a cordless lawnmower go for a model slightly larger than what you expect to need. Remember that if your battery runs down before you’ve finished the lawn you can’t just pour a bit more fuel into the tank. Recharging is a longer process than that. So when choosing a cordless electric lawn mower do take careful note of the battery specification, what area of lawn it is recommended for, and how many minutes it will run between recharges.
Flickr.com, from miggslives
Before the invention of the lawn mower (or lawnmower) only the rich could afford large expanses of lawn. A farmer could, of course, keep grass down to a reasonable length by grazing his animals on it, but the way of getting a really neat appearance was to have a troop of garden staff armed with scythes and shears.
Then in 1830 Edwin Budding, an Englishman from Stroud in Gloucestershire, had a bright idea. He was in a textile factory watching a roller-blade machine smoothing the surface of a fabric when the thought struck him. Why not combine a scythe blade with a wheel? He experimented and eventually came up with an arrangement of several blades mounted between two wheels. As the machine moved forward the wheels turned and the blades sliced through the grass. From these beginnings have emerged both the simple manual lawn mower and the great variety of advanced grass-cutting technologies of the present day.
Initially, of course, the mowers were pushed or pulled by hand – and for a century it was hard work. Some people attached mowers to harnesses and had their ponies pull them, but someone still had to walk behind and controlling the animal was not always easy! Today, of course, there’s a move back to pushing manual lawn mowers as people try to go “back to nature” and reduce hydrocarbon emissions
At the time of writing this article there is apparently on display in a Chicago exhibition something described as the “missing link” in lawn mower evolution. It consists of a tricycle with a rotary grass cutter built in between the rear wheels. Whether something like that existed in the past seems doubtful, but one has to ask why. After all, in the years before electric and liquid fueled mowers its inventor could have made a small (or not-so-small) fortune. Is this the way forward for a pollution-conscious era?
In the unconscious absence of the tricycle mower, however, something had to be done to fit grass cutting into the age of labour-saving devices. Very shortly after applying for his patent, Edwin Budding went into partnership with another engineer and started to manufacture mowers. He also sold licenses for other companies to manufacture similar products and one of these companies was Ransomes of Ipswich in the east of England. Ransomes started making lawn mowers in 1832 and the company still exists. It was bought in 1998 by Textron of the USA, who then put it together with the Jacobsen brand to create Ransomes Jacobsen.
Lawn mower developments in the 20th century
Returning to more than a century ago, for some years steam power was used to pull mowers but it was always cumbersome, and then in 1902 Ransomes introduced the world’s first petrol driven lawn mower. This British company did not rest on its laurels but continued with its programme of innovation. It was doing many imaginative things with electrical power in fields such as the trolley-bus and the battery-powered truck, and then in 1926 brought out the first electric lawn mower powered from a mains supply.
Companies such as Atco and Qualcast flourished during the 1920s and there was much experimentation with different combinations of features. The rotary blade cutter, with its horizontal cutting action, was developed. Larger lawn areas called for machines on which the user could sit and drive, so the riding lawn mower came into being – although the original developers of these machines could surely not have imagined that there would eventually develop a sport of lawn mower racing with speeds in excess of fifty miles per hour! As lighter engines and plastic components became available the technology moved on further. Flymo introduced and popularised the hover mower in the 1960s, making life much easier for the owner of a small lawn.
And so we move on. The mulching mower, machines for working on steep embankments, machines designed for high-grade twenty-first century golf courses, tennis courts, bowling greens, sports fields, and much more. Electrical technologies have moved on apace over recent decades so that now rechargeable batteries are available to power cordless lawn mowers capable of covering large amounts of ground between recharges. And then we mustn’t forget what surely must be the ultimate in labour-saving lawn-care, the robotic lawn mower which allows its owner to sit in a deck chair sipping a drink while the faithful machine runs around the lawn unsupervised and when finished returns to its docking station to recharge for next time.
A Draper Cordless 24V Rotary Lawn Mower in use
Click on the book pic or below
Click on the book pic or below