It's 1913 You're driving along in your brand new Ford Model T. The roof is down, the sun is out, life is good.
But you're running out of gas.
Luckily, the world's first gas station just opened up around the corner.
So you pull in and fill up your car in seconds.
This was a brand new concept at the time and it planted a seed that would go on to change the world.
The car market exploded and soon more than 150,000 gas stations had been built all across the country giving people the freedom to travel like never before.
Since then, gas stations went from being dangerous fire hazards at the side of the street to ultraefficient pit stops, pumping out 3 billion gallons of fuel around the world every day.
We modeled the entire thing to show you the hidden engineering behind gas stations the 100-year quest to master them and the incredible mechanisms that make them work.
In order to understand how gas stations work today we need to go back to a time before they even existed.
Most people didn't have cars yet but kerosene was being widely used to power lamps and stoves.
