Lawn Mowers!

2007-12-27T16:16:00.000-08:00

Salut tout le monde!

Pour le cours d'anglais, j'avais à écrire un petit texte d'anglais sur n'importe quelle invention avec un camarade de classe. Moi et mon coéquipier avons choisis comme découverte (plus ou moins technologique) : la tondeuse.

Merci de ne pas copier notre texte!

Some inventors are not as famous as they should be. Try to imagine yourself mowing your yard with a sickle and not having enough time to spend time with your friends on week-ends because it would take you a complete day to cut your grass. Well, a man rescued our world from this pathetic life by inventing the lawn mower, that awesome machine that will always drive us crazy. But who is that man? What is the history of that machine? What are the most innovative lawn mowers nowadays?

First of all, since the beginning of the time, an invention needs an inventor to be invented and the lawn mower isn’t an exception to that rule. This man has a name, and it’s Edwin Beard Budding. He first had an idea to cut his grass faster and easier when he saw a machine in a local cloth mill. He thought about creating a reel-type mower. It consisted of a series of blades rolling near the ground, attached to a handlebar. What a fabulous thinking that was! Imagine, before that everyone was cutting grass with a scythe, a sickle or a shear! Today, we can even buy similar models of that invention in some hardware since it doesn’t pollute.

Secondly, it’s not every man that invents something as useful as the lawn mower. Edwin was an English engineer from the city of Stroud. He was born in 1795 and died at the age of 51 years old. He was a great entrepreneur and, with the help of his partner John Ferrabee, who is another English engineer from Stroud, they started their business by creating a brand new factory in their natal city. They took out a patent on the lawn mower and when other companies wanted to copy them, they needed to pay because Budding and Ferrabee put under licence their brand new invention.

In the third place, with time, every product evolves. New technologies join the lawn mower world to upgrade the original version, to get it faster, and recently more eco-energetic. In the very late 1800s, steam powered mowers which were really popular because they reduced a lot the human effort. Few years later and for more than a half of a century, petrol engines dominated the market. It’s surprising that some electric models came out in the 1920s and 1930s but was not as popular as their fierce rival, the petrol lawn mowers. But, the major innovation in the world of lawn mowers remains when the rotary hover mowers emerged in the early 1960s. The company Flymo brought it to the market first. Nowadays, some models like the low emission gasoline engines are manufactured to help reduce the pollution. Also, some mufflers are even added to make lawn mowers less noisy. Many kinds of mowers are now available in the world but the most high-technological one is the Automower. That electronic machine can cut your grass when you don’t even have to lift a little finger. Moving alone, dodging obstacles, recharging his battery automatically… all you have to do is to set up the limits and to press the big green button “START”!

Referring to the questions we asked above, Edwin Beard Budding invented the first machine that was used to cut grass. With his partner Ferrabee, they commercialized that product and it became popular really fast. By the time, new technologies permitted to bring the lawn mowing near the perfection for the ultimate lazy man. We all know the progress will never stop, so what will be the next step in the fabulous world of lawn mowing?

André's bloggyzor!

Lawn Mowers!