Originally invented in the 1950’s, the leaf blower was improved to its currently recognizable form in the early 1970’s by Japanese gardening engineers. It was embraced as a simple time-saving device for households of most income brackets, and though they have been involved in various environmental controversies involving their notorious emissions, have now settled down into being an accepted part of modern consumer gardening society.

Leaf blowers were occasionally frowned upon by some neighborhoods. In general they were seen as not contributing to the solution of the problem of tidying one’s property, but instead just blowing the problem away, and making it someone else’s. However, in most places the simple machines were welcomed. Due to prolonged droughts in many areas at that time, the use of water for everyday garden clean-up tasks was often prohibited, and this contributed to the leaf blower’s growing popularity. It added to the pleasing effect of a clean, well-kept yard and neighborhood without using any water. Once the drought periods were over, the homeowners continued to use their new yard power tools.

The number of gardening consumers using the machine has risen to the tune of 3 million yearly buyers who insist that the time- and labor-saving benefits of blowers are well worth their value. Many garden owners do not have huge chunks of time in which they can dedicate focused attention to the maintenance of their gardens. If they were limited to the traditional methods of using hand rakes and brooms, garden owners who spend several hundred dollars yearly on these machines might say, their gardens would otherwise wither and decay. Without these machines, their yards would become a general eyesore to their respective neighborhoods, due to a simple lack of quality time to invest.

Manufacturers of the blowers have proven to be an environmentally-aware and neighborhood-friendly crowd, with continued and significant reductions in emissions and noise levels included in every new model created. There is now a great variety of electric leaf blowers, which have proven to be much more environmentally friendly than their gasoline powered counterparts, while offering amazingly comparable levels of power and wind.

Since their inception 50 years ago, today’s generations of blowers have cut harmful hydrocarbon release levels up to 90%, making them essentially an environmental non-issue. They are an accepted means of yard clean-up in almost every US city. In addition, noise levels have been reduced over the years up to 75%, or in general down to 65 db, keeping them well under most cities’ noise level ordinances.