1885: Sylvanus F. Bowser delivers the first gasoline pump. It improves safety, but can't guarantee low prices.

The automobile was yet to be invented, and gasoline was a byproduct of refining kerosene for stoves and lamps. Some of that equipment could use gasoline, but it wasn't much in demand.

You bought fuel in a general, hardware or grocery store. You had to bring your own gallon (or whatever) can, and the storekeeper would ladle the flammable fluid from a barrel. Wasteful. Messy. Dangerous.

To reduce spillage, Bowser built a pump in his Fort Wayne, Indiana, barn. He sold and delivered the first one to Fort Wayne merchant Jake Gumper 123 years ago today.

The self-contained unit included a wooden storage barrel, marble valves, a wooden plunger, a hand lever and an upright faucet lever. It was a success. Bowser formed the S.F. Bowser Company and patented his pump in 1887.

The Bowser pump soon became known as a "filling station," and Bowser started selling an improved model to the first automobile-repair garages in 1893.

Most places that sold fuel to motorists used the "drum and measure" method. Gasoline was gravity-fed from a large steel drum into a five-gallon measuring can. The motorist then carried the can over to his automobile and poured the fuel into the car's tank through a funnel that was lined with a chamois filter to remove grit and impurities. A big bother all around, and not awfully safe, either.

Bowser came up with a big improvement in 1905: He enclosed a square, metal tank in a wooden cabinet equipped with a forced-suction pump. A hand-stroke lever pumped the gas. This pump featured air vents for safety, stops that you could set to deliver a predetermined quantity and -- wonder of wonders -- a hose to dispense the gasoline directly into the vehicle's fuel tank. He called it the Bowser Self-Measuring Gasoline Storage Pump. (Rival John J. Tokheim of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, had fitted a pump with a direct-delivery hose in 1903.)

The word bowser soon became a generic term for a vertical gasoline pump. That usage has dropped away in the United States, but lingers in Australia, New Zealand and, to a lesser extent, Canada. A bowser is also a tank truck that delivers fuel to airplanes on the tarmac, and in Britain the term applies as well to self-propelled tanks carrying any fluid that is delivered directly to the end user -- for instance, water after a disaster.

Bowser's later career was quirky and litigious. He invented and personally marketed a backscratcher and a sit-down enema. He also sold postcards of himself next to the "Stone of Scone," part of the coronation throne on which British monarchs sit while being crowned in Westminster Abbey.

Source: Petroleum Collectibles Monthly, others

PASADENA, California – For all you moonshine makers who thought your hobby was just a guilty pleasure, a new spin on distilling may actually help save lives. Using ancient technology reduced to a microscopic scale, scientists at Caltech have created new tools to detect disease and purify water using tiny stills.

The creation of the still around A.D. 500 was one of humanity's earliest, and still quite popular, technological advancements. Traditionally, a still boils liquids in order to vaporize and separate them. Now, using nanoparticles and lasers, liquids no longer need to be boiled to be separated.

Removing the heat requirement from distillation means the process could be used to separate living cells without killing them, which could lead to advanced disease detection. Other applications include extracting water cheaply and efficiently from sea water in low-energy saltwater distillation plants.

How do they do it? Take a tour through professor David Boyd's lab and go behind the scenes of this revolutionary process.

Left: A green laser evaporates the water from a liquid. This is the final stage of nano distillation.

Here is a diagram of the basic nano still technique. At top is the initial setup with gold nanoparticles sitting on top of a glass slide. The fluid waiting to be distilled is enclosed from above by a silicone rubber chip.

In the bottom diagram, a green laser operating near the resonant frequency of the gold particles is applied. The laser heats the gold nanoparticles, which then transfer the heat to the surrounding fluid. This small amount of heat is just enough to cause controlled evaporation over the gas bubble barrier, leaving pure water on the right-hand side of the diagram.

Click through to the next photo to take a closer look at each of these steps.

Illustration: Chemical Separations by Bubble Assisted Interphase Mass-Transfer, David A. Boyd, James Adelman, David Goodwin, and Demetri Psaltis

This spin coater is used to spread out the thin layer of gold nanoparticles on the glass slide. A drop of the gold solution is placed on the slide and the coater spins extremely fast. This spinning spreads the solution evenly and coats the slide with a nearly uniform 15-nanometer layer of gold.

To get a controlled spacing of particles there needs to be a structure in place to hold them. To achieve this, scientists add a polymer to the gold solution. This polymer forms a uniform lattice to structure all the gold. But observant readers will notice there was no polymer in the previous diagram. Where does it go? Click to the next photo to find out.

This is an oxygen etcher. Once the glass slide is covered with the polymer-and-gold solution, this etcher burns off the polymer, leaving just the gold behind.

This is a sample slide covered with a matrix of gold nanoparticles. The purple streaks on the slide are the nanoparticles, visibly spreading out from the initial drop applied to the slide during the spin coating. For those readers expecting the entire slide to be purple, scientists actually need only a small portion of the slide to be covered uniformly by the gold, so these streaks will suffice.

The particles have a unique property of rapidly dissipating heat, which is a key factor in how the still works.

In another part of the lab, the piece of silicone rubber is made. If you think back to the second image in this gallery, you'll recall that the silicone rubber encloses the fluid between itself and the glass slide. This piece of silicone is called the microfluidic chip because of the fluid channels carved into it.

The machine pictured at left is called a mask aligner. It creates a mold for the microfluidic chip. It does this by exposing an image (in this case, the shape and design of the chip) to a photosensitive material. The unexposed portion of the material is discarded, and the shape of the mold is all that's left. It's similar to a photo enlarger, but instead of a two-dimensional image, a fully formed nano structure is made. The final mold is then used to create fluid channels in a piece of silicone rubber. This silicone rubber ends up being the microfluidic chip.

Here, the silicone rubber chip is drilled to create ports for the nano still. These ports will be used to inject solutions for distillation and to extract the distilled liquid.

Tiny plugs of silicone are the doughnut holes of the micro-fabrication world. Sadly, these plugs will remain uneaten.

After fabrication of the microfluidic chip, we're ready to put it all together. The chip is glued to the gold-coated slide that we made earlier (pictured at center-left inside petri dish). Now we have a nano still, which has an electronic sensor attached for measuring the conductivity of the fluid.

Sometimes science is messy. This workbench is covered with a collection of syringes and gold nanoparticle-coated glass slides. The syringes are used to inject fluids through the ports into the channels in the still, which we'll see in the next photo.

In this photo, blue "Smurf blood" food-grade dye is injected into the nano still through a syringe. The dye makes it easy to see when the liquid has been distilled. The distilled water will be clear and the remaining water will become darker due to the higher concentration of dye.

A low-powered green diode laser shines down into the still. The laser is roughly the same strength as an off-the-shelf laser pointer. Very little energy is needed in the microdistilling process thanks to the heat-dissipating properties of the gold nanoparticles.

Professor Boyd, the lead researcher on the project, reveals that this process was largely discovered by accident. "We had this problem with [an] air bubble, so we started hitting it with a laser. Instead of getting rid of it, we saw that we were actually causing the distillation process to occur, which was completely unexpected," Boyd explains.

Are you smarter than a goose? Sure you are — one on one. But when it comes to working efficiently, you and your colleagues can't touch the gaggle. According to author Ken Thompson, geese and other animals that naturally form groups have a lot to teach us about business. In a theory he calls organizational biomimetics, Thompson lays out the principles underlying nature's management strategies. So what can you learn from a bird or an ant? Take a gander.

Ants and Bees Ants use pheromones to transmit messages about predators. Bees wiggle around to tell their comrades the location of food supplies. Thompson says people, too, could benefit from broadcasting more whole-group communications. While mass emails may seem annoying, one-way bulletins can actually increase group efficiency by giving everyone access to information and letting them decide how best to act on it.

Geese When geese fly in a V, the birds rotate in and out of the lead position. This is both to conserve energy and, according to Thompson, because no single bird has memorized the whole route. Collective leadership is the norm in much of the animal world, he says, though rare for humans. In the context of business, groups with rotating leaders possess greater initiative, resilience, and agility than those led by one executive.

Worms The brain of the tiny C. elegans worm has a mere 302 neurons. It doesn't need any more, because some of those neurons have an exceptional number of interconnectors. Translate this to the workplace: If an issue arises, the best-connected group members can serve as guides and help the team avoid bottlenecking at the top. These "hub" people can also quickly fine-tune strategy when new information comes in.

1957: It's E-day, as Ford Motor Company introduces its newest make, the Edsel.

In an industry celebrated for its spectacular failures, the Edsel still takes the cake. Although as mechanically sound as other Ford products, the car was criticized from Day One for being too ugly, too expensive and vastly overhyped.

The 1958 Edsel was intended to be an intermediate-level brand, bridging the gap between the cheaper Fords and pricier Mercurys and Lincolns. The most-affordable Edsel (the Ranger) cost 70 bucks less than Ford's top-end Fairlane, while the most-expensive model (the Citation) cost more than a Mercury Montclair.

In the post-mortem that followed the Edsel's early demise, the faulty pricing structure was cited by Ford as a big reason the car failed. Sales weren't helped, either, by the fact that it rolled out of the plant at the beginning of a recession. But there was more.

The Edsel -- named for Edsel Ford, Henry Ford's son who died of cancer in 1943 -- was the subject of an intense marketing blitz while still on the drawing board. The company promised an eager public something revolutionary, carefully baited the hook, and then failed to deliver. The Edsel was just another sedan on the basic Ford chassis.

Well, maybe not just another sedan. The classic barfly standard that everyone is good looking at closing time isn't true in this case. The Edsel was butt-ugly, period. A half century later, it's still butt-ugly.

Almost immediately after E-day, the superhype that had generated so much anticipation boomeranged on Ford. Automotive writers roundly trashed the Edsel, going so far as to compare the oval-shaped vertical grille to the female sex organ -- racy stuff for 1957.

Henry Ford II, who had opposed naming the car after his late father, believing it to be undignified, was no doubt furious and mortified. Robert McNamara, soon to become U.S. secretary of defense in the Kennedy administration, was president of the Ford Motor Company at the time and realized instantly he had a lemon on his hands. (A few years later, he'd be a little slower to realize that he had even a bigger lemon on his hands in a place called Vietnam.)

During the Edsel's first year, 1958, four models were produced and barely more than 63,000 were sold in the United States. Sales dropped in 1959, even though Ford had cut back to just two models, and on Nov. 19, 1959, barely two years after E-day, the company threw in the towel on the Edsel.

In one of those little logic-defying ironies, the Edsel today is a prized collector's item, fetching as much as $200,000 for a rare 1960 convertible.

Another victim of this historic automotive fiasco was the name Edsel itself. Although never a particularly popular boy's name -- rising to 400th on the 1927 list -- Edsel (from the Old German Adal, meaning "noble") has almost entirely vanished.

Source: Time magazine, Failure magazine

Let me start off by saying that I'm making this whole thing up.

Imagine you're in charge of infiltrating sleeper agents into the United States. The year is 1983, and the proliferation of identity databases is making it increasingly difficult to create fake credentials. Ten years ago, someone could have just shown up in the country and gotten a driver's license, Social Security card and bank account -- possibly using the identity of someone roughly the same age who died as a young child -- but it's getting harder. And you know that trend will only continue. So you decide to grow your own identities.

Call it "identity farming." You invent a handful of infants. You apply for Social Security numbers for them. Eventually, you open bank accounts for them, file tax returns for them, register them to vote, and apply for credit cards in their name. And now, 25 years later, you have a handful of identities ready and waiting for some real people to step into them.

There are some complications, of course. Maybe you need people to sign their name as parents -- or, at least, mothers. Maybe you need to doctors to fill out birth certificates. Maybe you need to fill out paperwork certifying that you're home-schooling these children. You'll certainly want to exercise their financial identity: depositing money into their bank accounts and withdrawing it from ATMs, using their credit cards and paying the bills, and so on. And you'll need to establish some sort of addresses for them, even if it is just a mail drop.

You won't be able to get driver's licenses or photo IDs on their name. That isn't critical, though; in the U.S., more than 20 million adult citizens don't have photo IDs. But other than that, I can't think of any reason why identity farming wouldn't work.

Here's the real question: Do you actually have to show up for any part of your life?

Again, I made this all up. I have no evidence that anyone is actually doing this. It's not something a criminal organization is likely to do; twenty-five years is too distant a payoff horizon. The same logic holds true for terrorist organizations; it's not worth it. It might have been worth it to the KGB -- although perhaps harder to justify after the Soviet Union broke up in 1991 -- and might be an attractive option to existing intelligence adversaries like China.

Immortals could also use this trick to self-perpetuate themselves, inventing their own children and gradually assuming their identity, then killing their parents off. They could even show up for their own driver's license photos, wearing a beard as the father and blue spiked hair as the son. I’m told this is a common idea in Highlander fan fiction.

The point isn't to create another movie plot threat, but to point out the central role that data has taken on in our lives. Previously, I've said that we all have a data shadow that follows us around, and that more and more institutions interact with our data shadows instead of with us. We only intersect with our data shadows once in a while -- when we apply for a driver's license or passport, for example -- and those interactions are authenticated by older, less-secure interactions. The rest of the world assumes that our photo IDs glue us to our data shadows, ignoring the rather flimsy connection between us and our plastic cards. (And, no, REAL-ID won't help.)

It seems to me that our data shadows are becoming increasingly distinct from us, almost with a life of their own. What's important now is our shadows; we're secondary. And as our society relies more and more on these shadows, we might even become unnecessary.

Our data shadows can live a perfectly normal life without us.

---

Bruce Schneier is Chief Security Technology Officer of BT, and author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.

Voggy adj. Smoggy weather caused when volcanoes, like Hawaii's active Kilauea, release sulfur dioxide that combines with dust and sunlight.

Admixed embryo n. Legalese for any early-stage embryo combining human and nonhuman genes or tissue. Encompassing both cybrids and chimeras yet sounding less apocalyptic than either, these hybrids are now approved in England for stem cell research.

Memristors n. pl. Resistors with memory — meaning that the resistance changes with fluctuations in electrical charge. If the charge is turned off, the element will remember the last resistance. Hypothesized in 1971 as the fourth basic circuit element (in addition to the resistor, inductor, and capacitor), memristors could make brainlike computing possible. A nanoscale version has finally been built by Hewlett-Packard.

Deep carbon n. Greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, stored deep beneath Earth's surface and underwater naturally. It could be released in catastrophic quantities as global warming raises sea temperatures. Typically ignored in climate-change prediction models, deep carbon may have a far bigger impact on our survival than driving SUVs or eating red meat.

— Jonathon Keats jargon@wired.com

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We have heard about the God gene and the gay gene -- though each has been met with significant skepticism. Now comes news of a gene that Swedish researchers are touting as a possible biological basis for why some guys won't settle down.

Credit a young researcher at Sweden's Karolinska Institute for discovering a link between a variation in the AVPR1A gene -- which has been linked to autism and how people interact socially -- and a propensity for men to skip out on women, or to have marital problems if they do tie the knot.

In a photograph on the Karolinska's website, the researcher, Hasse Walum, looks a little like rocker Kurt Cobain.

Walum did not report if he carries the tell-tale gene, although in a study of 552 sets of twins, all in relationships, Walum found that 40 percent of the men carried the Ramblin' Man variation of this gene.

The couples filled out questionnaires that asked questions such as:

Researchers then ran genetic screens of the subjects, discovering that a line of code at position 334 in the gene had a statistical correlation with the less committed men.

Women married to men who carry one or two copies of the suspect code were, on average, "less satisfied with their relationship" than were women married to men who didn't carry this code, Walum said.

This same gene has also been linked in a different study to dictatorial behavior, and the hormone, called vasopressin, made by this gene has been found to be plentiful in voles that mate for life.

But before women rush out to test their men for this genetic variation -- or we run DNA screens of John McCain and Barrack Obama to see if they have an autocratic bent hidden in their genes -- we need to realize that these tests are very preliminary statistical links. No one has physiologically linked this genetic variation to behavior in a relationship, or to Stalinistic behavior.

Walum is well aware of this, and pointed out that the effect of the genetic variation is "modest," and cannot be used to predict the future behavior of someone in a relationship.

A caveat that makes one wonder why researchers, institutes, and the media keep trotting out these preliminary associations between genes and profoundly important human behaviors like religion and relationship management in this way.

One reason is that they can be fun, like reading Tarot cards can be fun. These studies can also point scientists in a possible direction towards where to look for serious maladies such as autism, which is what Walum's work is focusing on.

"There are, of course, many reasons why a person might have relationship problems," Walum told the BBC.

Indeed, there are.