Interesting….
In 1963, John Regier was an employee of the Hesston Corporation, a manufacturer of farm and agricultural equipment. The company had recently engineered a device called the swather, which, propelled by a series of belts, cut hay, alfalfa and other farming materials and laid them out in windrows. The way the belts and pulleys operated allowed for counter- rotation—a process which particularly struck Regier. An idea came to him one day: What if he could incorporate the same technology into lawnmowers?
“So he went home and invented this thing that was able to operate on the zero-turn radius,” says Ken Raney, advertising manager at Hustler Turf. “He began selling them, but they weren’t really taking off the way he wanted them to. Nobody knew the technology then, so nobody wanted to buy it.” Regier’s patent was eventually sold to Hesston, which would eventually become Excel Industries—parent company of Hustler Turf. The mower was called—appropriately enough—the Hustler.
“We were the first company to offer mowers with zero-turn technology,” says Paul Mullet, president of Excel Industries. “After Regier sold us the patent, he came to work for us and the rest is history.” Excel Industries is the parent company of Hustler Turf Equipment, Inc., which manufacturers Hustler Turf and BigDog Mowers zero-turn mowers.[1]
In 1969, Grasshopper Mowers introduced the first commercially viable zero-turn mower,[2] and in 1974, Dixon coined the term "zero-turn radius" with their entrance into the mower market.[1]
In 1997, Robert D. Davis Jr. obtained United States Patent 5644903 for a new steering control he had invented for a zero turn radius mower, based on eight previous patents.[3][4]
Currently, there are more than three dozen zero-turn mower manufacturers offering a range of mid-mounted and out-front mowing deck options and accessories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-turn_mower