Hi
speedy, AT and NormTrust me to link the story back to lawnmowers!
I loved Speedy's observation that the steam engines 'just purred'.
There is something mesmerizing in watching those flywheels, cranks,
and the like move in a slow rhythmic fashion. And the smell of
steam and burning coal or wood is aromatic.
The steam age of lawnmowers never lasted long - no more than a decade.
Here is an extract from a book I am quite fond of:-
�The first step towards a power-driven mower was obvious: steam. In 1893 James Sumner, a Lancashire blacksmith, patented a steam powered mower, using the engine from a motorized tricycle he had devised. It was fired by petroleum or paraffin, and after various adaptions was manufactured by the Leyland Steam Motor Company, which was eventually to metamorphose into British Leyland.
In 1897 two models were offered for sale � a 25-inch machine at �60, and one of 30 inches at �90. Green and Shanks followed the same route, both companies marketing steam powered mowers at or soon after the turn of the century. But their considerable cost, great size, massive weight (around one and a half tons) and unweildiness combined to make them more than impressive curiosities, whose clangings and puffings and enormous turning circles were confined to a few sports grounds and country estates. Their time never came, for the flair and imagination of one of those Ipswich Ransomes made them reduntant before they were properly born.�The Grass Is Greener, Tom Fort, 2001, p145Here's one of those Leyland behemoths:- The Americans persevered with steam just a little longer:-
For me, the steam age is both romantic and nostalgic.
It also represented a slower, more relaxed world, rather than
the high revving, noisy, non-stop, modern age. I find steam relaxing.
Letting steam off.-------------------------
Jack