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Self-measuring pumps · Later Bowser, Inc.
On the record
Founded: 1885, Fort Wayne. Indiana Landmarks and the History Center both give 1885 for the company Bowser formed to sell his self-measuring pump; no incorporation record or first directory listing was retrieved, so the year is not proven. The sequence in the American Oil & Gas Historical Society’s account — first sale, then company, then the 1887 patent — is itself flagged: the patent application was filed 21 June 1886.
Founder: Sylvanus Freelove Bowser (8 August 1854 – 3 October 1938). The low-grade variant “Sylvester F. Bowser” is misidentified against the patent and every institutional source. Augustus Bowser is co-inventor on the 1887 patent only, not shown to be a company co-founder.
What it did: manufactured self-measuring storage, pumping and dispensing equipment for kerosene, gasoline, oils and other volatile liquids. The first device was a kerosene pump — a square metal tank with a wooden cabinet and a hand-lever suction pump. Any account calling the 1885 sale a gasoline-pump sale is misidentified on the fuel: automobiles were not yet the market.
Course: first sale 5 September 1885 to Fort Wayne grocer Jake Gumper. U.S. Patent No. 372,250 was filed 21 June 1886 and granted 25 October 1887, the patent itself. Operations on Creighton Avenue began 1887–1888; the gasoline version followed in 1905, with a hose for dispensing directly into a car’s tank. A six-storey, 60,000 sq ft corporate office was completed on Creighton in 1917, and the millionth pump was dedicated in June 1923. By the mid-1910s Bowser led quality fuel-pump making at home and abroad, and with Wayne Pump and Tokheim, Fort Wayne became the gas-pump manufacturing capital of the world.
Fate: closed as a Fort Wayne operation, the exact closure year unresolved. Headquarters moved to Chicago in the mid-1950s. The plant closure is carried as a CONFLICT: the History Center gives 1962, with the plant moved to Tennessee; a City of Fort Wayne account gives 1961. The company was acquired by the Keene Corporation in 1969. The Creighton complex passed to Dale W. McMillen Sr. in 1965, was leased to Phelps Dodge, burned in part in the late 1990s, housed the Fort Wayne Police until 2012, and demolition of the remaining office began in March 2017.
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- § 05 — business
Sources: U.S. Patent US372250A — https://patents.google.com/patent/US372250A/en ; Indiana Landmarks, “Bowser, Man and Building” (2017) — https://www.indianalandmarks.org/2017/05/bowser-building/ ; American Oil & Gas Historical Society — https://aoghs.org/transportation/first-gas-pump-and-service-stations/ ; ACGSI / History Center — https://www.acgsi.org/genweb/fort-wayne/bowser-fort-wayne-indiana.html . Sources as cited in the profile.