A bit of history

Perhaps there is nothing more familiar to the modern driver than the gas station. The vast majority of modern cars move using internal combustion engines, so the question of refueling a car at a gas station is still relevant - like a hundred years ago. However, a century ago, gas stations for cars were completely different - there was no equipment for gas stations in the modern sense.

So, de facto machines equipped with internal combustion engines, just invented, could be refilled in pharmacies. For a modern driver, this sounds like a bad joke - but a hundred and fifty years ago, it was in the pharmacy that the wife of the famous Karl Benz tucked her low-powered, but still real car with an internal combustion engine. Petrol in pharmacies was sold, of course, not for the purpose of servicing a passing car, but the opportunity to purchase it was also available to motorists.

Henry Ford and gas station

 Somewhat later, when cars began to be produced on a larger scale, the first refueling stations appeared in the USA, the home of the prototypes of modern gas stations. The original references refer to the first and second decades of the twentieth century. The described gas stations consisted of an office with a cash register and a large tank on props, equipped with hoses. Gasoline by gravity flowed into the tanks of cars - about any pumps or columns at the time were out of the question. And only when, largely thanks to Henry Ford, cars began to be produced in large quantities, and a car boom began, customer-oriented gas station owners began to improve their filling stations. It was expressed in bright, attractive signs, and in the fact that fuel tanks were equipped with fuel dispensers - gasoline was now pumped into the tank.

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There were small shops at gas stations - they could buy tires, batteries and other car accessories that were often necessary on the way. Not paid attention to the drivers - at the gas stations could eat and relax. In principle, gas stations in the United States of the thirties of the twentieth century were not much different from modern gas stations in any country of the world. So demand has spawned supply, which is relevant even now, many decades after the appearance of the first gas station.