The History of the Electric Start Lawn Mower

It is hard to imagine a world without lawnmowers, and it is equally hard to imagine a world without electric ones, but as a matter of fact, the lawn mower is less than 200 years old.

The first lawnmower

An English engineer by the name of Edwin Beard Budding invented the lawnmower in 1830. This lawnmower was merely a set of blades attached to a wheeled frame, and it cut the grass manually when the user pushed it. Made of cast iron with two wheels on each side, they did not become popular until the last decade of the 19th century. By that time, manufacturers had introduced steam-powered lawnmowers that were lighter in weight.

The first motor mower

In 1921, the Atco company in the United Kingdom put the first engine-powered lawnmower, the Atco motor mower, on the market. The Atco motor mower had a gas engine and a primitive form of rotary cutting that rotated the blades on a vertical axis. It was a large, bulky machine, but smaller and more powerful models came out over time. In the 1930s an American farmer named C.C. Stacy tried to power his own mower with an electric motor, but he used blades that were unsuitable for cutting grass. After the invention of the rotary blade, the next major innovation in power lawnmowers was the cordless mower.

The first cordless mower

While power cords limited the cutting range of the earliest cordless mowers, battery-powered cordless mowers soon replaced them, and their popularity increased. In recent years, Husqvarna released the first robotic lawnmower, and it is now on its third generation of models.

The lawnmower has come a long way from the simple invention that Edwin Beard Budding built over 18 decades ago. Who knows what kind of innovations the future may bring to make the lawnmower even more advanced than it is today.