A follow up to "Gardeners, Gurus and Grubs", this collection of stories looks at the heroes and villains of the gardening world. It talks about: how Heron of Alexandria surprised unwelcome visitors to his garden in the ancient times by squirting water over them from his newly invented fountain; the story of the garden gnome; and more.
A follow up to "Gardeners, Gurus and Grubs", this collection of stories looks at the heroes and villains of the gardening world. It talks about: how Heron of Alexandria surprised unwelcome visitors to his garden in the ancient times by squirting water over them from his newly invented fountain; the story of the garden gnome; and more.
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Overview
A follow up to "Gardeners, Gurus and Grubs", this collection of stories looks at the heroes and villains of the gardening world. It talks about: how Heron of Alexandria surprised unwelcome visitors to his garden in the ancient times by squirting water over them from his newly invented fountain; the story of the garden gnome; and more.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780750954143 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 11/23/2006 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Garden Heroes and Villains
By George Drower
The History Press
Copyright © 2013 George DrowerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7509-5414-3
CHAPTER 1
Techno Wizards
Edwin Budding's Lawnmower
In August 1830 a patent was filed for a grass-cutting contraption that was so revolutionary it would eventually enable virtually anyone to have an immaculate lawn. Hitherto, the absence of an effective mechanical means of cutting grass had meant that lawns had been the exclusive preserve of the privileged. For landowners who favoured a more systematic method than allowing livestock to nibble their green patches, lawn-cutting was usually done with a scythe, a primitive implement with a crescent-shaped blade that was swished to and fro on a long curved wooden handle.
Scything was quite a skill, as the social commentator William Cobbett noted: 'A good short-grass mower is a really able workman.' However, because grass could be cut only when heavy with damp, the hapless operatives had to work either in the early morning dew, or in the rain, or, occasionally and most grimly, at night by the light of torches or the moon – at the risk of horrendous personal injuries. As J.B. Papworth's 1823 Hints on Ornamental Gardening noted, even sleeping householders were not immune from the fortnightly lawn scything procedure because of the mowers' frequent use of sharpening stones to hone their blades, 'generally at the time of the morning when such noises are most tormenting'! And yet, irrespective of the mower's dexterity when using those fearsome cutters, the scythe unavoidably left many circular scars and unsightly irregular surfaces.
The only available cutting means other than the scythe was hand-shears, which were used at the edges of lawns and where the grass was too short or inaccessible under bushes. By advocating an enlarged version of that simple device, a Scottish landscape painter called Alexander Nasmyth (1758–1840) dabbled at making the first mechanical grass-cutter. In the late eighteenth century Nasmyth ingeniously suggested cutting horticultural grass with a pair of 6ft-long shears. Unfortunately, his gigantic spring-loaded scissors worked only on seriously overgrown lawns and were so heavy and cumbersome that they had to be trundled about on a wheel!
The seemingly improbable venue of the really significant breakthrough in the development of lawn-cutting equipment was the bustling mill town of Stroud, which in the early nineteenth century was the hub of the Gloucestershire woollen industry, astride several converging valleys. The district had ambitions to improve its prosperity by enhancing its reputation as maker of smooth quality woollen products, and to facilitate this a race was on to find a means of cutting the rough imperfections and knotted blemishes (called 'naps') from the surface of its finished cloth. In 1815 the clothier John Lewis in the local village of Brimscombe reckoned he had solved the problem by means of a bench-mounted machine with a cylinder of rotating blades into which the cloth was fed. The cut was uneven, however, because the blades struck the cutting plate at intervals, but within weeks that important cropping difficulty was solved by Stephen Price. A Stroud engineer, Price was reputedly inspired by a napping machine that was invented in America (by someone called Mallory) and then imported to a local mill. In August 1815 Price patented a machine similar to Lewis's except that the blades on the cylinders were curved, thus providing a continuous cut. Price's device was apparently made at the Phoenix Mill foundry in Stroud and installed in numerous mills in the neighbouring valleys. At the nearby town of Dursley the machines were serviced by Edwin (Edward) Beard Budding, a technician who has since been variously described as a mechanic, foreman and carpenter.
Budding had an aptitude for solving engineering problems, and already had the beginnings of a track record as the inventor of a variety of devices. Between 1825 and 1830 he designed a revolver that was more advanced than Samuel Colt's patent of 1836. Later on he would also design an adjustable wrench and a lathe. Quite when he had the brainwave of wondering if the napping contraption could be adapted into being an effective means to cut grass is unclear, but that he did is beyond doubt.
Unlike so many seeking to profit from their innovations, Budding had the business nous not to be too greedy. Wisely reckoning he could best advance himself by sharing his discovery, in 1830 he went into business partnership with John Ferrabee, who had established the Phoenix Iron Works in 1828 and developed a reputation for producing quality engineering contraptions. By an agreement signed on 18 May 1830 their profits from the lawnmower were to be equally divided. John Ferrabee, who undertook to finance the cost of the revolutionary grass-cutter's development, would have the right to manufacture, sell and license other manufacturers to produce lawnmowers. Edwin Budding's responsibility would be to solve any technical difficulties in the lawnmower's production.
Historically, although Budding came to be accepted as the inventor of the lawnmower, in his historic 1830 'Machine for Mowing Lawns' patent, he very deliberately admitted that his device was essentially an innovation: 'I do not claim as my Invention the separate parts of my machine, considered without reference to the effects to be produced by them; but I do claim as my Invention the described application and combination for the specified purpose.' Unlike Price's bench-mounted napping device, which needed to be driven by crank wheel or belt from a revolving waterwheel, the lawnmower was supposed to be pushed (although a second handle was provided so that, if required, it could also be pulled). In 1831 the prototype was made by Ferrabee to Budding's design. The mower had a main roller that drove the whirling knives through a system of gears, which enabled those 19in cutting blades to rotate at twelve times the speed of the roller, and worked against a rigid knife bar on the underside of the machine.
The Budding lawnmower went on sale in 1832 at a cost of 7 guineas, which included a grass box and wooden packing case (the manufacturer's catalogue also offered package and delivery 'to any principal railway station in the United Kingdom'). Technically brilliant though Edwin Budding might have been, he was also commercially minded enough to allow his radical new machine to be presented as being enormously fun to use. Thus, conspicuous in the otherwise dour wordage of his 1830 mower patent, were the encouraging words: 'Country gentlemen may find in using my machine themselves an amusing, useful, and healthy exercise.' In 1831 one of the very earliest mowers went into service at the Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park. According to an enthusiastic article in the Gardener's Magazine soon afterwards, the foreman, Mr Curtis, claimed to be entirely delighted with the machine which 'does as much work as six or eight men with scythes and brooms ... performing the whole so perfectly as not to leave a mark of any kind'.
However, the operational reality was that the cast-iron lawnmower was so heavy, that when covering large areas it often took two persons to cut with it. Other practical difficulties were that the cutting cylinder immediately at the front of the machine was so close to the ground that sometimes it would (contrary to the London Zoo's glowing endorsement) catch mounds on the surface and lurch the machine into the ground, thus leaving an uneven height of cut; and the contraption had an exposed cogwheel drive which made it extremely noisy. According to the Gardener's Magazine, 'so great was the noise caused by these cogwheel machines, that in most establishments they could not be used while the family was in residence before 8am, when the inmates had risen'. So not much improvement from the scythe!
Ferrabee soon realised that, although his own selling network was well established, he needed to reach a wider market. In 1832 Ransomes of Ipswich, already renowned as manufacturers of plough shares and other agricultural machinery, were sold a licence to produce and wholesale the Budding mower. Another licensee was James Shanks, a Scottish engineer in Arbroath. When a Budding lawnmower purchased to cut the 21/2 acres of lawns on the wealthy W.F. Carnegie's Arbroath estate was found to be not up to the job, Shanks was asked to build a 27in-wide mower that could be pulled by two horticultural labourers, or a pony. The latter proved to be the most effective when cutting was carried out in dry weather, since the pony left no hoof marks on the grass and enabled Carnegie to cut his lawns in less than three hours. In 1842 Shanks registered the design in Scotland of an even larger such machine, 42in wide (the term 'shanks's pony' reputedly originated from this innovation). Budding's patent only covered England and Wales, because until 1852 Scotland still had its own patent regulations. Nonetheless, in 1841 Ferrabee had travelled to Scotland to check with Shanks that there were no infringements. The use of animal power was established and some horticultural firms even began selling leather galoshes to protect lawns from damage by the ponies' hooves.
Regardless of the practical usefulness of Budding's radical machine, sales were such that by the early 1850s a total of only some 4,000 mowers had been sold. This was partly because the mower was still too far ahead of its time: the idea of suburban lawns had still not really caught on; nor had the explosion of enthusiasm for sports played on grass, such as lawn tennis, cricket, golf and football. Also, the hitherto innovative Budding inexplicably seems to have made virtually no attempt to improve on his original design. During the 1830s he and Ferrabee had merely extended their product range with 16in and 22in machines, and then 30in and 36in devices in 1852. But now there was a sense of desperation because the Patent Office had started to allow improvements in design to be patented, which opened up the field to others. Thus, even though Budding's simple 'penny-farthing' chassis format would remain the mainstay of popular lawnmower design, it would be others who would find the solutions to the significant improvements that needed to be made.
It was Ransomes of Ipswich, for example, who solved the problem of the revolving cutting cylinder colliding with the ground. Having realised the fault was a matter of imbalance caused by the small wooden roller behind the cutting cylinder being too close to the rear drive roller, Ransomes placed the cylinder between the rollers – a brilliantly simple solution that led to an even cut. In terms of the lawnmower's irritatingly noisy gears, Budding had proffered the cure in his 1830 patent, which stated: 'The revolving parts may be made to be driven by endless lines, or bands, instead of teeth.' Astonishingly, nothing was done about this until 1859, when Thomas Green, a Leeds blacksmith, patented the world's first chain-driven lawnmower. This too had a conventional 'penny-farthing' chassis, but compared to the Budding gear-drive mowers was virtually noiseless. New forms of propulsion were then applied. In 1892 James Sumner of the Leyland Steam Motor Company produced the first ever steam-powered mower, although it did nothing to solve the lawnmower weight problem, because it weighed 1 1/2 tons! Seven years later Ransome's patented the first ever petrol-driven lawnmower, a cumbersome 42in contraption ideal for sports fields.
By then had appeared a machine that offered amateur gardeners an affordable means of mowing. In 1869 Budding's penny-farthing format was superseded by the Manchester firm Follows and Bates, who devised a patent mower known as the Climax. Instead of having an extremely heavy main roller, that device cleverly had two large, though lightweight, outside side wheels with internal cogs, through which the cutting cylinder was driven. This meant that the machine had few parts and was therefore much lighter. It sold for virtually a fraction of the old Budding machines: compact, 6in-wide mowers ideal for cottage gardeners could be bought for 10s 6d. Appropriately, because the side-wheelers were especially effective on coarse grass, they sold exceedingly well to gardeners in America – from where, ironically, the idea for the inspirational cloth-napping machine might have originated.
Sadly, Edwin Budding never lived to see the numerous variations of his ingenious machine in popular use. In 1846 he died of a stroke, aged only 50. The lawnmower, it seems, did not make him wealthy, nor did it warrant his receiving an obituary or any form of visual portrait. In his later years, although a trusted partner at the Phoenix Iron Works, he eked out a living at the nearby town of Dursley as an engineer at Lister's, successfully working to improve the perpetual carding machine, which had inspired his original lawnmower idea. Subsequently, and despite his position as a garden hero, he was also seen as something of a villain because it was his lawnmower that created the tyranny of all gardeners being obliged to be seen to have tidy lawns.
John Aitken's Chainsaw
Now the most destructive and controversial horticultural tool – tainted by involvement in the destruction of rainforests – the chainsaw is often assumed to have been invented in the 1920s by a German engineer called Andreas Stihl. It was, in fact, originally devised in the late eighteenth century as a medical instrument!
Its creator was John Aitken, an Edinburgh surgeon who lectured on chemistry, anatomy, medicine and surgery at the University of Edinburgh. Of his early life not much is known other than that he probably learnt his trade in Edinburgh and published books on medical subjects, such as Principles of Midwifery or Puerperal Medicine (1784). It sold at a price of 2s 6d, and the good-hearted doctor donated the proceeds to an Edinburgh maternity hospital he had founded in 1784. Then followed A System of Obstetrical Tables with Explanations (1786). It was in these works that Dr Aitken outlined and illustrated devices for use in obstetrics. One, which he invented himself, was the chain or 'flexible' saw. Before the introduction of this device, surgeons operating on bones had needed to use a scalpel or conventional medical saw, which all too often unavoidably caused considerable collateral damage to tissue and organs around the bone that required sawing.
Aitken's saw consisted of two handles connected by a serrated steel chain (like a miniature bicycle chain) with sharp teeth cutting on the convex surface. The cutting contraption was introduced by means of a curved needle passed through the soft tissue around the bone. When the saw was in position the needle was replaced by a handle, and then the second handle was attached. The device would then be pulled back and forth around the bone to be cut off. Use of the chainsaws meant there tended to be less need for limb amputation, which at the time was standard treatment for severely infected and damaged bones. Almost simultaneous (in 1786) another Scottish doctor, James Jeffray, who was a surgeon in Glasgow, apparently invented a remarkably similar saw, except that his was modelled on a watch chain. In 1876 Tieman & Company, a firm of medical instrument-makers, patented a saw consisting of two handles connected by a wire of cast steel on which were strung a series of steel beads with sharp cutting edges. Nevertheless, for much of the nineteenth century, Aitken's simple chainsaw was a useful surgical instrument which seemed to require no modification.
The next evolutionary step in chainsaw evolution occurred forty-six years after John Aitken's death in 1790. In 1830 a German doctor of orthopaedics called Bernard Heine invented the first mechanical mechanism for a chainsaw. His 'Osteotome' consisted of angle-set cutting teeth attached to an endless chain that was guided by a blade around two sprockets driven by a handle on one of the sprockets. The device was said to be an improvement when performing amputations because it sometimes avoided the need to use a hammer and chisel. But the speed of the hand gearing was low and the saw ricocheted off compact bone, thus making it difficult to control. However, it made Heine a medical celebrity and in 1834 won him the coveted Prix Montyon of the Académie des Sciences in Paris. In 1894 the 'Osteotome' was improved on by Leonardo Gigli, an Italian obstetrician who introduced a fine twisted wire saw, which provided a narrower and quicker cut.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Garden Heroes and Villains by George Drower. Copyright © 2013 George Drower. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,1. Techno Wizards,
2. Garden Spoilers,
3. Invaders and Infiltrators,
4. Of Greatest Advantage,
Further Reading,