Sixty years ago, this gentleman, probably Gordon Carlson of the DeVry Technical Institute of Chicago, made the cover of the April 1961 issue of Radio Electronics magazine by mowing his lawn automatically with this fully automatic electronic lawnmower. But this wasn’t a pie-in-the-sky idea concocted by a futurist. Mr. Carlson actually built the thing, and described the electronics in detail in the magazine. Since the mechanical details would vary from lawnmower to lawnmower, he left many of them to the reader. In this case, the automation was added to a Jacobsen Lawn King. But the basic idea was rather simple.

Buried a few inches under the lawn was an insulated wire carrying an alternating current. On front of the mower (shown in the inset in the lower right hand corner of the cover) were two pickup coils, one to the left, and one to the right. When the mower was directly above the wire, the induced currents would be equal, and the mower would proceed straight ahead. But if one current got stronger than the other, the signals would be amplified by the electronic circuit and would trigger a relay which would steer the mower to either the left or the right, using an electric motor coupled to the mower’s steering. To keep the machine from constantly hunting, a further refinement was added. If the mower was only slightly off course, the corrections would be made slowly. But if it got way off track, the steering motor would operate at high speed.

As a nod to safety, a limit switch in front of the mower would cause it to stop if it encountered an obstruction such as a toy, a pet, or a child. As shown in the likely staged photo below, this scheme could apparently be trusted.  I scoured news archives and found no reports of a young woman meeting her demise in a lawnmower accident in that time frame.