The first filling station was a small-town German pharmacy
In 1888 Bertha Benz took the world's first automobile on its maiden long trip from Mannheim to Pforzheim and ran low on fuel. She topped up at the city pharmacy in Wiesloch, which sold petroleum solvent. Other chemists soon followed, and for years drivers also filled up at hardware stores and blacksmith shops.
Purpose-built stations came later. The first went up in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1905, and Standard Oil of California opened another in Seattle two years afterwards. Early attendants often cleaned windscreens for free. In 1912 a Standard Oil of Ohio site in Columbus let motorists drive in the front door and out the back. A Gulf station opened in Pittsburgh on 1 December 1913 was the first designed by an architect and the first to hand out free road maps; on day one it sold 30 gallons at 27 cents each.
The names vary as much as the buildings. North Americans say gas station, some Canadians say gas bar, and Australians call it a servo. The British word petrol began as a brand of mineral oil solvent made by Carless Refining and Marketing. Indians may call it a petrol bunk, while in Japan it is a gasoline stand. Russia got its first stations in 1911 through a deal with the Nobel brothers' firm, and had about 440 by 1914.
Most of a station lies out of sight. Tanker trucks unload into underground tanks by gravity through capped openings on the edge of the site, and buried pipes carry fuel to the dispensers, which measure the volume pumped and work out the price. Vapor recovery systems capture fumes, liquefy them and return them to the lowest grade tank.
Pumps sit on concrete plinths to guard against collisions. Spilled fuel and rainwater run into a channel drain and then an interceptor that filters out hydrocarbons before the water reaches a sewer or the ground. Pay-at-the-pump terminals send data to the register indoors over serial cable or Ethernet, while clerks can typically do little more than switch pumps on and off. Change continues: Pearson Fuels opened an alternative fuel station in San Diego in 2003, and in 2019 a garage in Takoma Park, Maryland, became the first American filling station converted to electric charging.
Source: Filling station
