treefrog wrote: ↑Sat Jul 13, 2019 8:33 pm
I guess unattended coin-op petrol machines would not be allowed in our world today.
Some of the pumps at my local Morrisons garage take card payments and I've used pumps in France that take banknotes.
coppinpr wrote: ↑Sun Jul 14, 2019 7:36 am
The BMR piece is very interesting. Is it common knowledge that they made a coin op petrol pump?
I wasn't aware of it. What date and newspaper was that clipping from TF?
The text is a bit puzzling. It describes it as a "French, Theo Sumura multiple pump... Importers Theo Co. Ltd., of Liverpool", but the sign proclaims it "
'The Brecknell' Slot Automatic Petrol Brecknell Munro & Rogers Engineers Bristol".
So it was bought in 1929, just three years after William Bryan, together with Slack & Parr Ltd., filed
patent GB280355 for a suspiciously similar-looking device. Slack & Parr Ltd., like Bryan, started as a Kegworth-based garage and had associations with Rolls Royce. This small, private engineering company celebrated their centenary in 2017 and describe their core business as "the design and manufacture of high precision geared metering pumps for man-made fibres and other industries; and Hydraulic flow dividers." It's interesting that Archie says of the pump, "the weights and measures men like it" because apparently, like the Speak Your Weight scale, Bryan's petrol pump fell foul of Customs & Excise.
According to Melvyn Wright, "the Weights & Measures authority raised a number of objections to his petrol pump idea, but not before 1000 of them had been made and sold by Slack & Parr Ltd. of Kegworth!"