Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (31 page)

The garden of medieval times was a blend of herbs, vegetables, and wildflowers
.

Each year, Americans sift and sprinkle one million tons of chemical fertilizers on their lawns to keep them lush and green. We also toss uncounted tons of lime, potash, and bone meal to fix soil pH, ensuring brightly colored flowering shrubs, bulbs, and plants. About one hundred gallons of water a day are consumed by the average American home, with no insignificant portion of that being sprayed on front, back, and side lawns.

But we weren’t always so ardent about our lawns.

The meticulously manicured, weed-free, crabgrass-proof lawn is largely a modern phenomenon. In the mid-1800s, when American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne visited England—where the rage for solid-green lawns was in full cry—he was distressed by the vista’s artificiality and pretension. He wrote home that he longed for the more natural American front yard, rich in its varieties of weeds, nettles, clovers, and dandelions. This “natural look,” in fact, is the earliest recorded vogue in lawns.

The classical Greek garden of 400
B.C
. boasted a small plot of mixed green grasses and weeds. Commingled with these were wildflowers, planted to resemble a miniature natural meadow. Hand watering was a time-consuming chore and lawns were kept small and easily manageable. Two hundred years later, the Persians were celebrated for their small, intricate flower gardens, where stretches of green grass were used only to offset the flowers’ colors. Grass was background, not foreground. And in the Middle Ages, lawns, as depicted in tapestries, paintings, and illustrated manuscripts, were festooned with delicate wildflowers, with grass kept to an accenting minimum.

For centuries before the invention of the lawn mower, grass went uncut. A tall, free-growing, weedy plot of green was regarded as a thing of beauty. While Hawthorne longed for the naturalness of the American lawn, poet Walt Whitman sang the praises of grass as “the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” Perhaps it is not surprising that lawn weeds were tolerated, if not cultivated, since truly weed-free grass seed had yet to be developed. Moreover, animal manure—the most common form of garden fertilizer for centuries—was replete with undigested weed seeds. Fertilizing a lawn was equivalent to sowing weeds.

In the 1800s, with the growing popularity in the British Isles and Holland of golf and bowling (the latter originally an outdoor lawn game), closely cropped turfs became a necessity. Lawn mowing was often achieved by flocks of grazing sheep. The sheep, though, were soon to be replaced with a mechanical, man-made contrivance.

Lawn Mower: 1830, England

In one of those ironies where a man’s surname seems to predestine his professional calling, the lawn mower was the creation of a British gardener named Budding.

As foreman in an English textile plant, Edwin Budding was familiar with a new rotary shearing machine used to cut nap off cotton cloth. In the 1820s, he wondered if the machine could be adapted to shear his own yard, and for the British “bowling green,” a grassy turf down a stand of stately trees. By 1830, in Stroud, Gloucestershire, Budding was ready to patent his machine “for cropping or shearing the vegetable surface of lawns, grass-plots and pleasure grounds.” The device was a nineteen-inch roller mower that employed the principle of a set of rotating cutters operating against fixed ones—a rather straightforward adaptation of the method for shearing nap at the textile factory where Budding worked.

One popular grass-cutting method in Budding’s time was the centuries-old technique of scything. It required that grass first be dampened to give it “body” against the blow from a scythe. Consequently, Budding stressed that his mechanical mower would cut dry grass. And he advertised in 1832 that “Country gentlemen will find in using my machine an amusing, useful and healthful exercise.” To his disappointment, country gentlemen were unimpressed with the rotary lawn-mowing invention, preferring to take their exercise by swinging a scythe.

Large, horse-drawn versions of Budding’s mower were tried on British country estates in the 1860s. But gardeners and estate owners objected to hoof scars (which had to be patched up) and horse droppings (which had to be picked up). The horse-drawn rotary mower was no real time-saver.

When the cost of hand-pushed rotary mowers began to drop, around the 1880s, their popularity increased among average home owners in Britain and America. The mowers became the preferred way to cut grass, despite several attempts by inventors and manufacturers to introduce steam-powered mowers.

(
Clockwise) Scythe cutting blade; hand-held grass sickle; rotary blade mower and grass catcher; mower after Budding’s 1830s’ model
.

The first major improvement over the manual rotary device was developed in 1919 by an American army colonel, Edwin George. Installing the gasoline motor from his wife’s washing machine in a walk-behind, roller-blade lawn cutter, George produced the first
gasoline-powered lawn mower
. It was the advent of inexpensive mowers in general, and especially of the gasoline-powered invention of Edwin George, that helped popularize the vogue of manicured lawns among the middle class.

The lawn seed business in America also experienced a significant turning point around this time. An inexpensive, genuinely weed-free grass seed was perfected by an Ohio farmer, Orlando Mumford Scott, a man whose surname would become synonymous with an extensive line of home gardening products. Scott, and the company he formed, also produced the first home-lawn fertilizer designed specifically to provide the nutritional requirements of grass, Turf Builder (in 1928); and the first combined grass fertilizer and chemical weed killer, Weed and Feed (in 1946).

But it was Scott’s weed-free grass seed, combined with the convenience of the gasoline-powered mower, that launched the greening of American lawns. The roots of a grass movement were under way.

Burpee Seeds: 1880s, Philadelphia

One man more than any other—a poultry farmer named Washington Atlee Burpee—was responsible for adding splashes of color to the American lawn. What Orlando Mumford Scott did for grass, W. A. Burpee did for flowers.

Before his name became a commonplace adjective for flower and vegetable seeds, Burpee was something of a poultry prodigy. In the 1860s, as
a young boy living in Philadelphia, he took up the hobby of breeding chickens, geese, and turkeys. By the time he entered high school, he was contributing insightful articles to leading poultry trade journals of the day. And before graduating, he operated a purebreed-poultry mail-order business out of his parents’ home, offering not only his own fowl but also his own breeding manuals.

The business expanded to include purebreed livestock. And the twenty-year-old Burpee, to provide his customers with the proper food for their pedigreed animals, in 1878 began to offer special, high-quality seeds in his catalogues. Much to his surprise, more orders poured in for seeds than for animals. Within two years, he was heavily promoting seeds for tomatoes, cucumbers, turnips, lettuce, and other vegetables.

By the turn of the century, livestock and fowl were a minor sideline in a catalogue devoted to vegetables, fruits, and flowers. The catalogues themselves, which at one time ran up to two hundred pages, became popular reading material. They contained not only trustworthy gardening advice but also colorful anecdotes of Burpee’s worldwide travels in pursuit of the biggest and tastiest produce. Throughout America, numerous families named their sons Washington Atlee, and on Burpee’s cross-country seed-hunting trips, he’d visit his young namesakes and present them with gifts. Millions of American home owners were planting their lawns with Scott’s weed-free grass and their vegetable and flower beds with Burpee’s high-quality seeds.

After Burpee’s death in 1915, his family led a campaign to have the American marigold, their father’s favorite, adopted as the country’s national flower. They later even christened a new marigold the “Senator Dirksen,” in honor of the Illinois legislator’s efforts on the flower’s behalf. That campaign failed, and America did not have a national flower until 1986, when President Ronald Reagan signed legislation adopting the rose.

Rubber Hose: 1870s, United States

The watering can is used today almost exclusively on small indoor plants, and even then the process of repeatedly filling the container is tedious. But before the development of the garden hose, almost all watering of lawns, flower beds, and vegetable gardens, regardless of their size, was done with a can. The rubber garden hose (and fire hose) was not only a time-saving godsend; it was the first practical rubber item manufactured—before automobile tires and weatherized raingear—and in many ways, it marked the birth of the rubber industry.

Rubber was a new and novel material in sixteenth-century Europe. The first rubber balls, made by the American Indians, were introduced to Spain by Christopher Columbus, and over the next two centuries many European inventors experimented with the substance but found it unsuited for practical applications, the reason being that rubber, in its natural state, is brittle
when cold and sticky when hot. It was a struggling American inventor, Charles Goodyear, who discovered through a kitchen accident the secret to making rubber at once dry, soft, and pliant.

Goodyear believed that rubber might be made more useful if it was “tanned,” or “cured,” as is leather to extend its life. One February evening in 1839, he was experimenting in his home kitchen, adding various chemicals to “cure” rubber. A mixture of sulfur and rubber dropped from his spoon onto the hot surface of the stove. Too busy to wipe it up, he went about his research while the rubber melted, then later cooled and solidified. When Goodyear did scoop up the congealed mass, he was astonished by its smoothness, dryness, and flexibility. That night, in an intense winter cold, he nailed the piece of “gum” outside the kitchen door. In the morning, he brought it in, flexed it, and was jubilant. It was not brittle. It had retained its elasticity. Charles Goodyear had discovered that sulfur “cures,” or “vulcanizes,” rubber.

Additional experimentation was required to perfect the process of vulcanization. But Goodyear was out of money. He had already expended an enormous amount of time, and all his savings, in quest of a better rubber. He and his wife and five children were destitute and dependent upon relatives for food and housing. He pawned family belongings and sold his children’s schoolbooks with the justification, as he wrote in 1855 in
Gum-Elastic and Its Varieties
, that “the certainty of success warranted extreme measures of sacrifice.” But Charles Goodyear did not succeed commercially. He was imprisoned for debt, and when he died, in 1860, he left his family with some $200,000 in unpaid bills and loans.

After Goodyear’s death, ten years passed before rubber became America’s dream product. And that happened through the efforts of a man whose name was strikingly similar to Goodyear’s.

Dr. Benjamin Franklin Goodrich, a Civil War surgeon turned businessman, started the B. F. Goodrich Company in Akron, Ohio, in 1870. At that time, there were still few known applications for rubber. But Goodrich was convinced of rubber’s potential. He had watched a close friend’s house destroyed by fire because a leather fire hose burst. And in the oil fields of Pennsylvania he had seen the need for a rubber hose to transport oil. He also knew from his medical training that rubber could have numerous applications in surgery and rehabilitative therapy.

Gifted and debonair, Goodrich had no difficulty persuading businessmen to invest in his newly formed rubber company. Within a few months, the Akron plant was producing the world’s first rubber hoses. The company’s heavy-duty, cotton-covered fire hose quickly became the firm’s best-selling product.

The year 1871 also witnessed several other rubber firsts: gaskets, bottle stoppers, preserving-jar rings, and rollers for the popular clothes wringers used by housewives. For outside the house, the chief product was the garden hose. Leather hoses suffered from several drawbacks: When repeatedly wet
and dried, leather ages and cracks; it becomes brittle through extended exposure to sunlight; and its elasticity is severely limited, with the potential of frequent ruptures. Goodrich’s rubber, on the other hand, was impervious to moisture and temperature, and it had an inherent strength that withstood high internal water pressure with minimum chance of rupture. Through the 1880s, professional and weekend gardeners only too gladly relinquished the tin watering can for the rubber hose, a blessing for the gardener as well as for the lawn.

Wheelbarrow:
A.D
. 200, China

The wheelbarrow holds a distinctive place in the history of man-made devices. It illustrates a phenomenon known as independent invention—that is, the wheelbarrow was developed in different places at different periods, and was used for different purposes. The Chinese and European wheelbarrows are of particular interest.

The earliest form of wheelbarrow was designed around
A.D
. 200 by Chuko Liang, a general in the Chinese Imperial Army. Its purpose was to transport large quantities of military supplies along narrow embankments. The device’s immense single wheel measured about four feet in diameter. It had a dozen spokes, and was positioned so that the center of gravity of the load could be directly above the wheel axle. Historians believe that General Liang adapted the wheelbarrow from a smaller, two-wheeled handcart already in use in China for carrying rice and vegetables.