Edwin Beard Budding

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Edwin Beard Budding (born August 25, 1796 in Stroud , Gloucestershire , † September 25, 1846 ibid) was an English engineer and inventor of the cylinder mower and the English .

life and work

Edwin Beard Budding was born to a landowner in Stroud, Gloucestershire. After an apprenticeship as a carpenter, he turned to metalworking. Around 1827 he designed a multi-barrel Pepper Box pistol. In a cloth factory, he saw how the fabric was trimmed with a cutting cylinder after weaving in order to achieve a smooth surface. Budding realized that the concept of a blade rotating against a second fixed blade could also be applied to cutting grass, which until then had to be mowed with a scythe. On August 31, 1830, he applied for a patent for the lawnmower with a blade width of 480 mm. Since the chain had not yet been invented, the power was translated by means of a cast iron gear train. The inventor was considered insane by some contemporaries and therefore tested his machine at night - which is why he was supposedly thought to be moonstruck. Tests in London's Regent's Park, however, showed that his invention could save six to eight gardeners.

Together with John Ferrabee, he built the first lawnmowers in his factory, the Phoenix Iron Works in Stroud. While Budding was responsible for the technical development, Ferrabee took care of the marketing. In 1832 they sold the patent to the Ransomes company in Ipswich , which sold more than 1,000 budding lawnmowers by 1840 and more than 7,000 by 1858 and developed the invention further. Thanks to this invention, maintaining large lawns that had previously had to be mowed with a scythe was no longer a privilege of the nobility; Large, short-cropped lawns in parks or on sports fields seem natural today, but maintaining them has only been technically and financially possible since Budding's invention. The designer himself advertised the machine with the comment: "Country gentlemen may find, in using my machine themselves, an amusing, useful, and healthy exercise."

Mowers invented by Budding are on display at the Stroud Museum, the London Science Museum, the Lawn Mower Museum in Southport and the Milton Keynes Museum. The Edwin Budding Award , donated by the Golf Course Superintendents of America, honors outstanding technical developments in golf.

Budding died in 1846 of complications from a heart attack. His grave is in the village of Dursley in Gloucestershire.

literature

  • Tom Fort: The grass is greener: our love affair with the lawn . HarperCollins, London 2000, ISBN 0-00-257064-5 .
  • Ian McNeil (ed.): Biographical dictionary of the history of technology, London 1996

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from April 16, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / ferrabee.org
  2. ↑ https://www.gcsaa.org/community/awards/edwin-budding-award
  3. ^ Edwin Beard Budding (1796-1846) - Find A Grave Memorial. In: www.findagrave.com. Retrieved November 26, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME Budding, Edwin Beard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British inventor and engineer
DATE OF BIRTH August 25, 1796
PLACE OF BIRTH Stroud , Gloucestershire
DATE OF DEATH September 25, 1846
Place of death Stroud , Gloucestershire