Edwin Budding (1795-1846)

His name may not be well-known, but Edwin Budding had a profound and lasting impact on gardens and gardeners across Britain through one invention: the lawnmower.

Edwin Beard Budding was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire in 1795, the illegitimate son of a yeoman farmer.  He was well educated and showed a propensity for solving technical problems, which led him to work as a pattern maker in the iron foundries and a machinist in the cotton mills.

Prior to his invention of the lawnmower in 1830, Budding designed a pistol more technically advanced than Colt’s patent of 1836, an adjustable spanner and a lathe, while also engineering improvements to the machinery used in the cotton industry.

Budding’s idea for a lawnmower came from his work in the cotton mills, where a napping machine used blades to shear excess fibres from the surface of cloth.  Budding adapted this principle to a machine which could be operated by a single person to cut grass evenly and efficiently.

Budding’s original design is easily recognisable in lawnmowers used today.  His machine was nineteen inches wide, made of wrought iron and was powered by pushing a roller which drove the gears to move a rotating cutting cylinder, with another roller in between which could be adjusted to alter the height of the blades.  The mower was pushed from behind and the clippings were collected in a tray at the front.

The design was patented in 1830 and Budding went into partnership with John Ferrabee to produce his mowing machine, reputedly carrying out trials on his own lawn under cover of darkness.  Ferrabee was the owner of Pheonix Iron Works and was able to contribute expertise in licencing and sales, while Budding concentrated on design and engineering.  In 1832 Ransomes of Ipswich, the leading manufacturer of agricultural plough shares, was granted a licence to wholesale Budding’s mower, and the increased marketing capacity attracted buyers across the country.

The range of mowers was extended, with larger and smaller sizes added and an additional handle fixed to the front of the mower to allow it to be pulled as well as pushed.  By 1840 over 1,000 mowers had been sold.  Budding was aware of the success of his invention but was not to see the full ramifications on British society, as he died in 1846 following a stroke.

Prior to the introduction of Budding’s lawnmower, grass had been cut using a scythe by teams of labourers rising early in the morning to work while the grass was wet.  The piles of cuttings would be collected later in the day, often by women and children.  This work was laborious, poorly paid and considered among the lowliest of garden tasks.  The lawnmower was to revolutionise this aspect of garden work.

Various improvements were made to Budding’s original design, including adapting the machine to be drawn by a horse to cover large areas, reducing the overall weight, and lessening the noise of operation.  With the introduction of cast iron, intricate and uniform parts could be mass-produced, reducing costs and standardising quality.  By the 1860s, lawnmowers had become affordable, reliable and easy to use and offered a labour-saving innovation to the gardening profession.  The technology was also employed in the care of sports fields and public parks, and was integral to the popularity of lawn tennis, introduced in the 1870s.

The impact of the lawnmower spread much wider than the professional gardener or groundsman.  As Budding himself suggested in an article published in 1832 in the Gardener’s Magazine, ‘Country gentlemen may find, in using my machine themselves, an amusing, useful and healthy exercise.’  The aspirant Victorian middle classes embraced the fashionable hobby of gardening and created a distinctive garden style.  The lawnmower had brought the aristocratic status of a lawn within easy reach of the ordinary person, and the perfectly manicured lawn became a ubiquitous feature of suburbia.  Lawnmowers were marketed to ladies and amateurs, and have been used by them ever since.

Further reading:

David Halford, Old Lawnmowers, 2008

Caroline Ikin, The Victorian Garden, 2012