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Industry
On the record
Sold the first self-measuring pump to a Fort Wayne grocer, for kerosene (see “Bowser invented the gasoline pump in 1885.”). The company he founded on Creighton Avenue made the city a capital of fuel dispensing; its records and glass negatives rest at the History Center.
Sylvanus Freelove Bowser (8 August 1854 – 3 October 1938) was a Fort Wayne native who had worked as a traveling salesman before he turned inventor. His pump began in 1885 as a kerosene dispenser — the first unit sold to a Fort Wayne grocery — and was patented in 1887. S. F. Bowser & Company built its works on East Creighton Avenue, and in 1905 Bowser adapted the design into the "Self-Measuring Gasoline Storage Pump," the machine that made curbside gasoline practical and safe. By the 1920s the company was selling some $13 million of pumps a year, with offices in Toronto, London, Berlin, Paris, and Rotterdam — and the headquarters stayed in Fort Wayne. The street by the plant was renamed Bowser Avenue in 1914, and the company's six-story headquarters, completed in 1917, later served as Fort Wayne Police headquarters. In Australia and New Zealand, fuel pumps are still generically called "bowsers." Bowser himself lost control of the company in the early 1930s; the News-Sentinel records that the estate of the man whose pumps had sold worldwide totaled only $11,000 at his death.
Find them on this page
- § 06 — people of the record
From § 06, People of the record, and the sources cited there; Wikipedia, "Sylvanus Bowser"; Indiana Landmarks, "Bowser, Man and Building"; Leininger, News-Sentinel, 7 November 1981; Allen County Genealogical Society, S. F. Bowser & Company page.