Pittsburgh’s history-making Gulf station sold 30 gallons of gas at 27 cents a gallon on its first day, and drive-in “service stations” spread almost as fast as the automobile itself. The drive-in gas station was the solution, helping usher in a golden age for the American automobile. By 1910, when American roads held a half-million automobiles, this began to pose a problem. Louis in 1905 or the station Standard Oil opened in Seattle in 1907-relied on curbside pumps. Even early businesses devoted solely to selling gasoline-such as the world’s first purpose-built gas station in St. Gasoline was sold right on the sidewalk, causing traffic jams as cars pulled to the side of the road to refuel. Today, Bowser Avenue in his hometown of Fort Wayne, Ind., is named after him, and fuel pumps in New Zealand and Australia are still known as “bowsers.”īowser’s invention launched a new “filling station” business, typically offshoots of other merchants. Bowser had previously invented a successful kerosene pump. In 1905, as the United States manufactured 25,000 automobiles a year, Sylvanus Freelove Bowser developed a pump to safely transfer gasoline from a barrel into a car’s tank. A few enterprising (and fearless) salesmen sold gasoline from pushcarts equipped with hoses. Pioneering motorists had to take a bucket to the general store, hardware dealer, drugstore or local refinery and fill up from a gasoline barrel.
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The car ran not on gasoline but on highly volatile petroleum ether, which pharmacies stocked.īy 1900, the United States had 4,000 cars (compared to 20 million horses), but gasoline was still considered a waste by-product of producing kerosene. She was driving the newly constructed Patent Motorwagen automobile from Mannheim to Pforzheim with her 13- and 15-year-old sons as passengers, to prove to her husband Karl that his invention was marketable. Bertha Benz refilled the tank of the first automobile driven across country at the city pharmacy in Wiesloch, Germany, on Aug.
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The first places to sell fuel-appearing not long after the first cars-were pharmacies, as a side business.
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