Stephen Humphreys wrote: >Gone are the days (if they existed) when you stopped, stayed in your car, >and said "put 5 gallons in" - and even then I'd wager a bet they'd >hand over a ten pound note and said "put that much in".
In those days, there were no ten pound notes and the fuel was 2 shillings per gallon. Ten pounds would have got you 100 gallons. I suspect you meant to refer to a ten shilling note. Before the electrically-operated pumps, you couldn't ask (at least not successfully) for fuel by total cost. With the manual pumps, the attendant worked a pump lever to pump the fuel into a calibrated class cylinder in the upper half of the pump unit. Getting the fuel to the car's tank through the filler hose was then a simple matter of gravity. I guess a willing attendant might have been able to calculate the volume from the amount the customer wanted to pay. (Mechanical calculators of the time could only add and subtract.) However, the calibration might not have had the necessary resolution to legally deliver the calculated amount. I didn't see any electric fuel pumps until some time after the end of World War II. I'm not sure if they showed both volume and price, or volume only -- leaving it up to the attendant to calculate the total. Perhaps someone as long in the tooth as I am can remember. Bill Potts, CMS Roseville, CA http://metric1.org [SI Navigator]
