The original version was large and made from cast iron
. It had a roller on the back of it and pushed a huge cutting cylinder on the front.
The next step in the evolution of the lawn mower was the chain-driven version that was invented in 1859 by Thomas Green. The first person in the United States to get a patent for a lawn mower was Amariah Hill, who received his on January 12, 1868. The first commercially successful lawnmower was invented by Elwood McGuire of Indiana in 1870. His invention was a lightweight push mower.
The first lawnmower with a motor came out during the 1920s from a company called Atco, and was a huge success. The first rotary mowers were sold by an Australian company called Victa in 1952. A Midwest farmer named C.C. Stacey is credited with inventing a mower with an electric engine in the 1930s.
A popular landscaping tool is the hedge trimmer. Leonard Wood developed a device in 1854 that had a cutter wheel and worked by taking it alongside hedges. The fist hand-cranked hedge trimmer was made available in 1922 by an English company called The Little Wonder. This model was regularly used up to the 1950s. The Little Wonder Company came out with the first gasoline powered hedge trimmer in 1955.
Another important tool for working outside is the wood chipper. In 1884 the first functional wood chipper was invented by a man from Germany called Peter Jensen. The first wood chippers that were accessible for commercial use was the drum chipper, and is still popular today. In 1999 Kurt Snider invented the digital stop/start automatic feed for wood chippers.
The leaf blower was invented in the 1950s by a man named Dom Quinto. It was initially presented in the United States as a new type of agricultural chemical sprayer. The companies that produced it realized people were taking out the chemical dispensing parts, so the only thing left was the blower. A drought in California caused the leaf blower to become popular as a part of doing garden work. In the past few decades sales of leaf blowers has been in the hundreds of thousand annually and is now a standard piece of equipment for lawn maintenance.
The need to remove snow in the winter has caused many people to try and invent a device that would do the trick. The first functional snow blower was invented by a man from Montreal, Canada named Arthur Sicard in 1925. This device consisted of three different parts. There was a four wheel drive truck chassis with a truck motor attached to it. The part that took in the snow and the part that blew it out chutes ran on separate motors. These vehicles quickly became very popular and were used to clear roadways of snow. It could shoot the snow up to 90 feet away from the truck or directly into the back of another truck.