- Based on your Google activity
- Design: This futuristic machine featured a five-foot diameter plastic sphere enclosing the operator, who sat on an air-foam-cushioned seat, designed to provide comfort and protection from dust and grass clippings.
- Features: It boasted luxuries unheard of in lawnmowers at the time, including running lights, a radio telephone, air conditioning, and even a cooling system for chilled drinks.
- Functionality: Beyond mowing, it was envisioned as a multi-purpose machine capable of weeding, feeding, seeding, spraying for insects, plowing snow, hauling equipment, and even serving as a golf cart.
- Historical Context: Marketed as a symbol of mid-century American optimism and fascination with technology, it was featured on the cover of a 1958 edition of Mechanix Illustrated, though it never went into mass production.
- Historical Documentation: The Comfort Lawn Mower, also known as the "Power Mower of the Future" or "Wonderboy X-100," was a genuine concept and prototype developed by Simplicity Manufacturing Co. in 1957.
- Media Features: It was notably featured on the cover of a 1958 edition of Mechanix Illustrated magazine, providing strong evidence of its existence beyond a mere concept or rendering.
- Detailed Descriptions from the Era: Contemporary descriptions and advertisements from 1957 detail its features, including the five-foot diameter plastic sphere, air-foam cushioned seat, electric generating system, running lights, radio telephone, air conditioning, and even a cooling system for drinks.
- Specificity of Features: The detailed and specific features mentioned in historical accounts, like the "radio telephone," point to a concrete design and prototype rather than a fabricated image.
- "AI-Generated" Claims: Some social media comments speculate the image is AI-generated due to its unusual and futuristic appearance for the 1950s.
- Rebuttal: While the design is indeed unusual, its historical documentation in publications like Mechanix Illustrated predates the advent of AI image generation by decades, confirming it as a real, albeit unproduced, prototype.
- Practicality Concerns: Questions are raised about the practicality and functionality of certain features, such as the effectiveness of air conditioning within a plastic bubble or the noise levels in an enclosed cabin, leading some to doubt its reality.
- Rebuttal: These concerns, while valid from a modern perspective, don't negate the existence of the prototype. It was a concept exploring future possibilities, and the practical challenges likely contributed to its failure to reach mass production, not its non-existence.
- Lack of Mass Production: The fact that it never became a commercial product can lead to skepticism about its authenticity.
- Rebuttal: Many prototypes and experimental vehicles, despite being real, never make it to market due to various reasons like cost, complexity, or market readiness.
Turn on your Visual Search History?
Google uses its visual recognition technologies to process the images you use to search, like when you search with Google Lens. If you turn on your Visual Search History, Google will save these images from eligible Google services to your Web & App Activity when you’re signed in to your Google Account. You can learn more about this setting and which Google services save images to it at g.co/Search/VisualSearchHistory.
How visual search history is used
Your Visual Search History may be used to improve your experience on Google services, like letting you revisit your past visual searches. It may be used to develop and improve Google’s visual recognition and search technologies, as well as the Google services that use them.
When visual search history is off
If you turn this setting off, any previous Visual Search History may still be kept and used to improve Google’s visual recognition and search technologies, unless you delete it from your Web & App Activity.
Visual Search History doesn’t affect images saved by other settings, like Gemini Apps Activity.
How to manage your Visual Search History
You can view, delete, or manage your Visual Search History at activity.google.com. To download your Visual Search History, visit takeout.google.com. Images will be deleted in accordance with your Web & App Activity auto-delete settings, although some types of images may be deleted sooner.
Google uses and saves data in accordance with Google Privacy Policy.