Exploring seismic waves is all about the vital earth science technology — reflection seismography — which revolutionized petroleum exploration in the 1920s. Seismic waves have led to oilfield discoveries worldwide and billions of barrels of oil.
Almost as soon as gasoline service stations appeared, inventors began experimenting with ways to make user-friendly pumps for consumers. The revenue possibilities of 24-hour self-service gasoline pumps prompted a number of innovators to develop coin-operated systems in the early 20th Century.
Self-measuring pumps once used to dispense kerosene were adapted for gasoline (see Wayne’s Self-Measuring Pump), even as inventors sought ways to automate payment at the pump.
Scientific American and Popular Mechanics featured some of the early designs for coin-operated gasoline pumps, noting that manufacturers had taken their cue from “the fortunes that have resulted from the harvest of pennies dropped into chewing gum slot machines.”
Trade magazines like Garage Dealer and Motor Age featured advertisements for coin-operated gas pump technologies of the 1920s.
But a coin-operated pump had risks, noted editors at Scientific American: “It is evident that a vending machine liable to hold fifty or a hundred half-dollars would be a magnet for thieves.”
The Anthony Liquid Vending Machine Company designed its “Anthony Automatic Salesman,” which the company marketed to garage owners. promising a savings of $5 in overhead costs for every dollar invested in the automatic, coin-operated pumps.
In Minnesota, William H. Fruen received the first U.S. patent for a coin-operated liquid dispensing apparatus in 1884. The inventor from Minneapolis designed an innovative “Automatic Liquid-Drawing Device,” according to Canadian historian K.J. Zeoli.
One of the better known coin-operated pump manufacturers originated with the Starkey Oil and Gas Company of Fort Collins, Colorado. Lewis P. Starkey, who first filed an application in October 1920, received his U.S. patent on November 29, 1927 (patent no. 1650882), which used electricity instead of a manual cranking system.
Patent drawing of “Self-Operating Filling Station,” the coin-operated gasoline pump invented by Lewis Starkey of Fort Collins, Colorado.
According to Zeoli, the L.P. Starkey Pump Company, which was later sold to Gas-O-Mat Inc. of Denver, produced two models of coin-operated pumps.
“Starkey and his wife ran a service station in Fort Collins. Starkey was constantly being awakened during the night by tourists who wanted gasoline. His wife actually came up with the idea of making a gas pump that would dispense gas without Starkey having to get out of bed and service the tourist. This gave Starkey the idea for the coin operated pump.”
“Unfortunately, Starkey allowed his patent to expire on one of the key components in his pumps,” Zeoli reported. The component, a “silent mercury switch” that prevented electrical circuits sparks, “went on to be used by thousands in the construction business.”
Although coin-operated pumps at gas service stations would prove impractical, there were notable attempts in the early 20th century, according to Zeoli. The October 18, 1913, issue of Popular Mechanics featured “The Gasoline Slot Machine,” reporting how an automatic pump did not require an attendant. Motorists could insert a half dollar coin into a slot and turn a crank.
The automatic pump was “touted as one of the first consumer friendly slot gas machines of the era,” Zeoli explains at the website Vintage Gas Pump & Oil History, adding, “The pump was so advanced, if a customer dropped a coin into an empty pump by mistake, the pump would return the coin after the first crank of the pump.”
Meanwhile, gasoline filling stations with uniformed attendants continued to expand nationwide following Gulf Oil’s example in Pittsburgh (see First Gas Pump and Service Station). Starkey Pump Company and other examples of the gas pump slot machines survive today in museums.
Gasoline dispensing automation seemed like a good idea simply lacking technology to make it work. Attempts continued as commercial names like Beacon, Gas-O-Mat, and others disappeared in a flurry of patents that could not overcome challenges of coin-operated pumps.
“You can sell gasoline 24-hours a day and 365-days a year, without effort on your part,” one company proclaimed, adding that paying was a simple process for consumers. “Drop the coin in the slot — a quarter, half-dollar, or a silver dollar, and Mr. Robot delivers the correct amount of gasoline.”
By 1915, an article in National Petroleum News reported a key drawback of unattended, coin-operated pumps: “One gasoline vending outfit tried out recently in a middle western city returned about $2 in real currency and $37 in lead slugs, buttons and counterfeit coins for its first 500 gallons of gasoline.”
Nonetheless, as a system for numbered highways was established, and U.S. 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles approved in 1926 (learn more in America On the Move), some coin-operated machines survived into the 1930s.
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The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please become an AOGHS annual supporter and help maintain this energy education website and expand historical research. For more information, contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2024 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.
Citation Information – Article Title: “Coin Operated Gas Pumps.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/technology/coin-operated-gasoline-pumps. Last Updated: November 20, 2024. Original Published Date: July 11, 2018.
Oil patch lore says “Yellow Dog” lanterns got their name because of two burning wicks that resembled a dog’s glowing eyes at night. Others say the lamps cast an eerie dog’s head shadow on the derrick floor.
Rare is the community oil museum that doesn’t have a Yellow Dog in its collection. Officially patented a decade after the Civil War, the two-wicked “Derrick Safety Lamp” would become an oilfield icon. But long before Yellow Dogs found their way to the oil patch, a similar design burned animal fat atop America’s lighthouses.
First patented in 1870, Jonathan Dillen’s lantern was “adapted for use in the oil regions…where the explosion of a lamp is attended with great danger by causing destructive conflagration and consequent loss of life and property.”
By the late 1700s, the cylindrical “Bucket Lamp” included two or four spouts protruding from its sides, according to Thomas Tag in Lighthouse Lamps Through Time. “Each spout carried a large diameter rope wick that extended down inside the body of the lamp into the oil.”
As late as 1874, four years after Yellow Dog lamp patent, the U.S. Lighthouse Board of the Department of Treasury continued to mandate the use of lard for fueling the beacons, later rejecting electricity and natural gas because of “the complexity and cost of the apparatus.”
By 1877, the Lighthouse Board changed its illumination mandate to kerosene, which would be supplanted by electric arc lamps and followed by incandescent bulbs.
Despite its many oilfield service manufacturers, the Yellow Dog’s origins remain in the dark. Some historical sources claim the derrick lamp’s design originated with the whaling industry, but neither the Nantucket nor New Bedford whaling museums have found any such evidence.
Railroad museums often include collections of cast iron smudge pots, but nothing approaching the heavy, crude-oil burning lanterns once prevalent in oilfields from Pennsylvania to California.
A 19th century illustration of a cable-tool driller with his nearby Yellow Dog lantern.
Inventor Jonathan Dillen of Petroleum Centre, Pennsylvania, was first to patent what became the iconic lantern of the early years of the petroleum industry. His U.S. patent was awarded on May 3, 1870. The two-wicked lamp joined other safety innovations as drilling technologies evolved.
The lamp was designed “for illuminating places out of doors, especially in and about derricks, and machinery in the oil regions, whereby explosions are more dangerous and destructive to life and property than in most other places.”
“My improved lamp is intended to burn crude petroleum as it comes from the wells fresh and gassy,” Dillen proclaimed. “It is to be used, mainly, around oil wells, and its construction is such as to make it very strong, so that it cannot be easily broken or exploded.”
Dillen’s Yellow Dog patent was improved upon and reissued in 1872 and again in 1877, when it was assigned to a growing oilfield equipment supplier.
In 1861, John Eaton made a business trip to the booming oil region of western Pennsylvania. Within a few years, he had set up his own business with Edward Cole. With the addition of Edward Burnham, the company grew to become a preeminent supplier of oilfield equipment.
In early Pennsylvania oilfields, a John Eaton biography by his great-grandson noted Eaton was considered “father of the well supply trade.”
By 1877, Eaton, Cole & Burnham oilfield supply had outlets in the Pennsylvania oil regions, including Pittsburgh and Bradford. The company changed its name Oil Well Supply Company the next year, according to a biography by his great-grandson, Louis B. Fleming.
“The first goods manufactured by the Oil Well Supply Company were made on a foot lathe,” John Eaton would recall. The oilfield equipment supply company was operating 75 manufacturing plants by the turn of the 20 century.
The biography, John Eaton, by journalist Fleming, cited the classic 1898 book Sketches in Crude Oil, which noted that Oil Well Supply company’s founder and president “may fairly claim to be the father of the well supply trade.”
A Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission roadside marker erected in Oil City in 1992 notes: “Oil Well Supply Company — Founded nearby in 1878, it was a leading manufacturer of oil well machinery and supplies, serving the oil industry across the globe. By the early 1900s, employment peaked at 2,000. In 1930 it became a subsidiary of United States Steel.”
Incorporated in Pennsylvania – the Keystone State – Forest Oil’s logo features the iconic two-wicked lamp invented in 1870.
In Oil City at its 45-acre Imperial Works on the Allegheny River, Oil Well Supply manufactured oilfield engines and “cast and malleable iron goods” that included the two-wicked derrick safety lamp. The 1884 Oil Well Supply catalog listed Yellow Dog lamps at a price of $1.50 each.
Today, along with their shadowy origins, the Yellow Dog lanterns are relegated to museums, antique shops and collectors. They sometimes can be found on display next to another unusual two-wicked lamp (see Camphene to Kerosene Lamps).
After experimenting with injecting water into some wells to increase production from others, Forest Dorn partnered with his father Clayton in 1916 to establish Forest Oil, an oilfield service company in Pennsylvania’s giant Bradford oilfield.
The company in February 1824 adopted the two-wicked oilfield derrick lamp as part of its logo, which included a keystone shape inside the lantern to symbolize the state of Pennsylvania — where the first commercial U.S. oil well was drilled in Titusville in 1859.
Forest Oil Company developed an extremely efficient technique for “secondary recovery” of trapped petroleum reservoirs. The waterflooding proved revolutionary for improving oilfield production nationwide. The technological leap began at America’s first giant oilfield, discovered in 1871 in Bradford, about 70 miles east of Titusville .
An oil museum near Bradford, Pennsylvania, educates visitors using a replica of an 1880s standard cable-tool derrick. Photo by Bruce Wells.
By 1916, oil production in the Bradford field had declined to just under 40 barrels a day. The reserve was considered by many to be dry — until Forest Dorn had applied his water-flooding technique to initiate secondary recovery of oil. Forest Oil became a recognized as a leader in secondary oil recovery systems.
Water-flooding boosted oilfield production as demand for gasoline for automobiles was growing (learn more in Cantankerous Combustion – First U.S. Auto Show).
As the science of petroleum geology (and petroleum engineering) advanced, secondary recovery technologies evolved nationwide. Enhanced recovery technologies have been applied throughout the petroleum industry — aiding in the extension of oil wells’ lives by as much as 10 years.
In Texas, the already considerable production from the largest oilfield in the lower-48 states, the East Texas oilfield, has continued since its first well, the Daisy Bradford No. 3, drilled in 1930.
The history of America’s “first billion dollar oilfield” is on exhibit at the Penn-Brad Historical Oil Park and Museum near Bradford, Pennsylvania — where a modern natural gas shale boom has renewed an historic oil patch economy.
Located in Custer City, three miles south of Bradford (home of Zippo lighters), the museum (maintained by many dedicated volunteers) “preserves the philosophy, the spirit, and the accomplishments of an oil country community.”
One attraction of the Penn-Brad museum is its 72-foot standard cable-tool derrick and engine house, replicas of 1880s technology that helped Bradford once produce 74 percent of all U.S. oil. It’s another noteworthy stop among other excellent Pennsylvania oil museums a few hours west of Bradford at the Drake Well Museum in Titusville.
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Recommended Reading: Early Days of Oil: A Pictorial History of the Beginnings of the Industry in Pennsylvania
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The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please become an AOGHS annual supporter and help maintain this energy education website and expand historical research. For more information, contact bawells@aoghs.org. © 2024 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.
Citation Information – Article Title: “Yellow Dog – Oilfield Lantern.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/technology/yellow-dog-oil-field-lantern. Last Updated: November 5, 2024. Original Published Date: September 1, 2008.
Proclaiming natural gas “the fuel of the future,” the American Gas Association sponsored a sleek rocket car powered by liquified natural gas (LNG) that set a world land speed record on October 23, 1970. The speed record at Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats would remain unbroken for more than a decade.
In 1882, Mrs. Karl Benz secretly took her husband’s “Model III Patent Motorwagen” on a 65-mile road trip. The public relations stunt took 15 hours. (more…)
Offshore oil and natural gas platforms have found use after retirement. Hundreds of former platforms serve as aquatic habitats; two historic jack-up rigs have been converted into museums and education centers in Texas and Louisiana; and a self-propelled platform launched satellites into orbit from 1999 to 2014. (more…)
Swiss inventor Henry Mohaupt used his experience from creating a World War II anti-tank weapon to develop a new technology for improving production of oil and natural gas wells. To improve perforating well casing, he used conically hollowed-out explosive charges to focus each detonation’s energy.
