Stateside: Indiana

Lost your job due to ill health? Lost your home to creditors because you lost your job due to ill health? Whinge no more! Take advantage of your adverse situation by inventing something! Yes, it’s the Pollyanna edition of the Stateside Tour, brought to you courtesy of childhood memories of small-town weekend entertainment riding my bike around the forecourt of a local service station.

What has this to do with Indiana, you might ask. Well, the bike slalom consisted of weaving our way around the petrol bowsers—“gas pumps” to my US readers—and Sylvanus Freelove Bowser, inventor of the pump technology, hailed from Indiana. It was before cars were even available, and Bowser figured out his invention while on long horse and sleigh and train rides. Like the Silicon Valley inventions PC and Mac, which were born of long hours tinkering in garages, the Bowser pump was born of long hours tinkering in a barn.

Bowser described the motivation and the process in a little autobiography he wrote called A Dream and A Reality, which is quoted at length in The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, Indiana, part of the NY Public Library’s collection that’s been digitized by Google:

“It was one morning in the early spring of 1885 that I was going out on a five o clock train in pursuit of my business as a salesman. Therefore I arose at four o clock and among other things I wanted to leave my wife with a good supply of water for the day. The well from which we got our water was about seventy feet deep… Over the well was built a little house and up in the roof was a big grooved swivel wheel over which the long well rope passed so that a bucket could be made fast to each end of it. By letting one bucket down for water you at the same time would be drawing up the other bucket full of water

“The little house over the well was unusually high. It simply had a roof on it and was not enclosed and the well being deep and the night still and very cold the steam that came out of the well froze on the ropes thus exposed between the mouth of the well and the roof. Therefore in order to draw water in this manner this frozen frost-covered rope had to pass through my hands and it being a very cold morning its sting was added to my hands. I took my grip and made the train… It was on this [trip] that my mind turned to the unpleasantness of drawing water out of this deep well on a cold morning.

“My thoughts turned to devising some better way, at which time I saw, as it were, a pump cylinder at the bottom of the well sufficiently large to hold a pail of water; the same being provided with a discharge pipe and a pump rod similar to our present pump and so arranged that with one full stroke I could discharge a bucketful of water. This looked good to me and I thought if it was good and practical maybe I could work up a little business out of it by manufacturing it for the market.

“Upon returning home I took it up with my brother who was an engineer on the Pennsylvania Railroad and lived the second door from me drawing water from the same well. Neither of us being versed in this kind of business but my brother having an acquaintanceship with a patent model maker who was quite well versed in mechanics of this sort we went down and laid the matter before him”

And the rest, as they say, is history. His self-measuring pump revolutionized the oil industry and, as automobile ownership grew, it made the network of gas stations servicing the motorists’ fuel needs possible.

“A volume could be written of the dark and trying times before the idea came to me and two volumes could be written of the times since, but you will observe that had it not been for these trying times and misfortunes of which I have had many, together with my broken health, I would not have lost my home, I would still be a traveling man, and there would have been no Bowser pump today.”

Indiana’s state slogan is “restart your engines”, a reference to the Indianapolis 500. Perhaps it will soon be “rethink your engines”. Forgive the use of a non-PC word just for the sake of a pun, but in its early days, the state slogan might just as well have been “remove your Injuns”.

--PEACE--

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