Way Back In The 1950s And 60s,

in magazines for adults and comics for kids,

my father always bought The Eagle for me every week, there always seemed to a be an article titled 'Of The Future' as in the car/aircraft/kitchen/boat or whatever of the future, but here is one I have not seen before, the golf cart of the future, behold the WonderboyX-100, not only was it a golf cart, it was also a lawnmower, it had a five-foot diameter plastic sphere in which the rider sits on an air foam cushioned seat. It has its own electric generating system for operating running lights, a radio telephone, air conditioning and even a cooling system to provide a chilled drink on a hot day. It can be used for many purposes. It can mow the lawn, weed it, feed it, seed it, spray for insects, plow snow and haul equipment. It could even be used as a golf cart, I like the above advertisement, Dad arriving home after a hard day at the office relaxes with a pipe and a whiskey whilst Mum does the gardening!

this was all back in 1957, in those days anything was possible,

the "Power Mower of the Future" as demonstrated in Port Washington, Wisconsin, October 14, 1957, it was built by the Simplicity Manufacturing Company, a U.S. company founded in 1922 by William J. Niederkorn. They built the contraption in 1957 and called it the Wonderboy X-100. The mower was featured on the 1958 cover of Mechanix Illustrated and was clearly well ahead of its time, but it was a promotional gimmick, during World War II, Simplicity temporarily halted the production of lawn and garden equipment to build electric fence products and surface grinders to satisfy the War Production Board, after the war the company went back in to building garden equipment, I wonder if some where amongst the company archives, some one will update the design bring out a 2030 version of the Wonderboy X-100? the Power Mower of the Future!