The Lawn Mower Is a Carpet Mill Machine Somebody Pointed at the Ground

US73807 was granted to Amariah M. Hills of Hockanum, Connecticut, on January 28, 1868, for a lawn mower. Hills went on to found the Archimedean Lawn Mower Company, and his patent is generally taken as the start of American mower manufacturing.

The machine itself came from a cloth mill.

Nap and grass

Edwin Beard Budding worked at a textile mill in Stroud, England, in the 1820s. Woolen cloth of the period came off the loom with a rough surface, and finishing it meant shearing that nap to a uniform height. The mill used a machine with a rotating cylinder of helical blades running against a fixed straight blade, so that the two edges passed each other like scissors and clipped the fibers cleanly at a set height.

Budding looked at that and saw a lawn. Grass is a surface of fibers that needs to be cut to a uniform height without tearing, which is exactly the problem the cloth shear had already solved. He patented the reel mower in Britain in 1830.

The scissor action matters. A reel mower does not smash the grass, it cuts it between two edges, which is why a well-set reel mower leaves a cleaner cut than a rotary mower and why golf greens are still cut with cylinders.

What it replaced

Before mowers, keeping grass short meant a scythe or livestock.

A scythe cuts well but demands real skill. A good scythesman works in the early morning while dew weighs the grass down, swings from the hips, and stops constantly to hone the blade. Cutting a large lawn evenly took a trained laborer most of a day, and an untrained one could not do it at all.

That is the actual social consequence buried in the patent. A large, close-cropped lawn had been a display of wealth precisely because it required staff. A machine an ordinary person could push on a Saturday made the lawn available to anyone with a house and a yard, which is a large part of why American suburbs look the way they do.

The engine

Hills and his competitors sold ground-driven reel mowers for decades. The wheels turn gearing that spins the cylinder, so the machine cuts only when you push it, and the effort comes out of your legs.

Gasoline rotary mowers arrived in the twentieth century and took over the consumer market, because a spinning horizontal blade is cheaper to build, handles tall or wet grass without jamming, and does not need precise blade-to-bar adjustment. It also tears rather than shears, throws debris, and is responsible for a large annual injury count.

The reel mower never disappeared. Groundskeepers who care about cut quality still use cylinders, and push reel mowers sell steadily to people who want a quiet machine with no fuel in it.

See the original

The full text and figures of US73807 are on Google Patents.