A Brief History of Zero-Turn Mowers

When buying a lawn mower to keep your grass trimmed and tidy, you may be overwhelmed by the sheer number of options available to you. If you’re interested in a riding mower that can give you precise, manicured results, particularly if you’re a professional landscaper, a zero-turn mower is the ideal choice. How did these mowers come to be? This brief background will help you better understand the mechanisms that led to the development of these popular riding mowers.

Initial Creation

The term “zero-turn” refers to a riding lawn mower that is capable of making a pivot on a radius of essentially zero, allowing the operator to perfectly line up their next row of cutting with the previous one. The result is a very even, clean cut that looks much neater than the results produced by other riding mowers.

A Missouri resident named Max B. Swisher is responsible for adding a third driving wheel to a riding lawn mower so that it had two wheels in the rear and one up front. The mower needed to be reversed in order to produce the zero-turn effect, which was fairly rudimentary. This first zero-turn lawn mower came out in 1949.

Later Developments

By the 1960s, a number of companies produced zero-turn mowers, and each created its own innovations to improve upon the basic design. At the Hesston Corporation, a man named John Regier noticed that the belt-and-pulley system on the swather the company built was able to spin in opposite directions on each side. When he put this system into a riding lawn mower, along with a two-lever steering system, a better zero-turn mower was the result.

The term “zero-turn mower” comes from the Dixon Company, while the single-lever steering system was developed by Robert D. Davis, Jr., in the 1990s, allowing today’s zero-turn mowers to operate much more efficiently than their predecessors.

Seeking zero-turn lawn mowers for sale in Minnesota? Visit our Alexandria dealership today to take a look at our wide stock of new and used zero-turn mowers. Let us know if you’d like to use our financing options on your purchase. Alex Power Equipment serves our customers in Sartell and St. Cloud, MN.