Gas Tanker Truck

A look back at Tanker Trucks

The first “Tanker Trucks,”  in somewhat of an indignity, were gasoline filled tanks mounted on wagons, which were hauled by horses. Horses pulled the wagons containing the fuel which ultimately would put them out of business as our primary means of transportation.

The first “motorized” tanker truck is generally credited to being developed by a European subsidiary of Standard Oil Company in 1905.  The truck was used to deliver oil products from railway stations to sub stations.

Tank trucks first started appearing on the roads of the United States around 1910.  Standard Oil started the trend, but other’s gasoline companies soon followed with their own fleets of tanker trucks.  Five years later, and these trucks were a familiar site on the highways and byways. By the Thirties, they numbered in the hundreds of thousands of trucks.
The tanker trucks used before 1920 were primarily a truck body with a tank mounted permanently to the truck chassis. It wasn’t until the late 1930’slater that the separate tank trailer came into fashion.  

The original big tank bodies gave early oil company advertising departments a huge canvas to  display the companies name and promote its fuel product line.
Another common use for these early tanker trucks was to hold either water or oil, which was used to spray the dirt roads common in the day, to keep the dust down.  Additionally ,these early tankers were used to distribute home heating oil products like kerosene.

With the popularity of the new tanker type truck, many companies were involved with producing this type of truck, including long lost names such as “Kelly”, “Garford”, “Saur”, “Locomobile”, “Corbit”, “Denby”, “Dart”, to name but a few.  These companies were the early pioneers of the development of the common gas tanker truck we know today.