From Prewar Car

[Chris Garner]

Pratt's advertising cards

[Tony Griffiths]

Pratt's advertising cards

Hi Chris, thanks for showing those. Might you have a way to scan them at high resolution?

[John Mason]

I am interested in the words in the caption “Pratts Motor Spirit.” Does anyone know when Motor spirit became petrol. I believe petrol was originally just a brand name as was Pratts motor spirit.

John Mason.

[Tony Griffiths]

I am interested in the words in the caption “Pratts Motor Spirit.”  Does anyone know when Motor spirit became petrol.  I believe petrol was originally  just a brand name as was Pratts motor spirit.

John Mason.

The term "Motor Spirit" was used to describe "petroleum spirit" for the "motor car". It was largely a British term used to describe petrol from the late 19th Century to the 1930s.
The word "petrol" was first used in reference to the refined substance in 1892, and was registered as a trade name by British wholesaler Carless, Capel & LeonardCarless, Capel & Leonard used "petrol" in its advertising as early as 1896, whereas their competitors used the term "motor spirit" until the 1930s.
Marcus Samuel formed The "Shell" Transport and Trading Company in 1897.
By 1904 the Shell name and pecten emblem were used to promote the company’s products, and in 1905 advertising for "Shell Motor Spirit" began.
Shell’s branding was so successful that it became a household name. "Shell Spirit" was used for all its petrol and appeared on the side of cans as either "Motor Spirit" or "Aviation Spirit".

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wik  and  https://www.autobulbsdirect.co.uk/blog/when-petrol-was-motor-spirit/
Amusingly, the US term "gas" has an English origin and "motor spirit" was so embeded in early motoring until the 1930s that some scientific publications, government reports, and newspapers still refer to it.

Carless, Capel & Leonard used "petrol" in its advertising as early as 1896, whereas their competitors used the term "motor spirit" until the 1930s.
The American English word gasoline denotes fuel for automobiles, which common usage shortened to the terms gas, motor gas, and mogas, and thus differentiated that fuel from avgas (aviation gasoline), which is fuel for aeroplanes. The term gasoline originated from the trademark terms Cazeline and Gazeline, which were stylized spellings and pronunciations of Cassell, the surname of British businessman John Cassell, who, on 27 November 1862, placed the following fuel-oil advertisement in The Times of London:

The Patent Cazeline Oil, safe, economical, and brilliant [...] possesses all the requisites which have so long been desired as a means of powerful artificial light.[12]

That 19th-century advert is the earliest occurrence of Cassell's trademark word, Cazelline, to identify automobile fuel. In the course of business, he learned that the Dublin shopkeeper Samuel Boyd was selling a counterfeit version of the fuel cazeline, and, in writing, Cassell asked Boyd to cease and desist selling fuel using his trademark. Boyd did not reply, and Cassell changed the spelling of the trademark name of his fuel cazelline by changing the initial letter C to the letter G, thus coining the word gazeline.[13] By 1863, North American English usage had re-spelled the word gazeline into the word gasolene, by 1864, the gasoline spelling was the common usage. In place of the word gasoline, most Commonwealth countries (except Canada), use the term "petrol", and North Americans more often use "gas" in common parlance, hence the prevalence of the usage "gas bar" or "gas station" in Canada and the United States.[14]
Coined from Medieval Latin, the word petroleum (L. petra, rock + oleum, oil) initially denoted types of mineral oil derived from rocks and stones.[15][16] In Britain, Petrol was a refined mineral oil product marketed as a solvent from the 1870s by the British wholesaler Carless Refining and Marketing Ltd.[17] When Petrol found a later use as a motor fuel, Frederick Simms, an associate of Gottlieb Daimler, suggested to John Leonard, owner of Carless, that they trademark the word and uppercase spelling Petrol.[18] The trademark application was refused because petrol had already become an established general term for motor fuel.[19] Due to the firm's age,[citation needed] Carless retained the legal rights to the term and to the uppercase spelling of "Petrol" as the name of a petrochemical product.[20][21]
British refiners originally used "motor spirit" as a generic name for the automotive fuel and "aviation spirit" for aviation gasoline. When Carless was denied a trademark on "petrol" in the 1930s, its competitors switched to the more popular name "petrol". However, "motor spirit" had already made its way into laws and regulations, so the term remains in use as a formal name for petrol.[22][23] The term is used most widely in Nigeria, where the largest petroleum companies call their product "premium motor spirit".[24] Although "petrol" has made inroads into Nigerian English, "premium motor spirit" remains the formal name that is used in scientific publications, government reports, and newspapers.[25]
The use of the word gasoline instead of petrol is uncommon outside North America,[26][failed verification][unreliable source?] although gasolina is used in Spanish and Portuguese and gasorin is used in Japanese.
In many languages, the name of the product is derived from the hydrocarbon compound benzene or more precisely from the class of products called petroleum benzine, such as benzin in German or benzina in Italian; but in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, the colloquial name nafta is derived from that of the chemical naphtha.[27]
Some languages, like French and Italian, use the respective words for gasoline to indicate diesel fuel.[28]

[Chris Garner]

Pratt's advertising cards

Hi Chris, thanks for showing those. Might you have a way to scan them at high resolution?

Sorry, Tony. No!!

[Tony Press]

That's the highest-resolution copy I've seen of that image - thanks for posting it. Let's jazz it up a little.

Thank you also Tony- with colour the picture could have been taken last New Years Eve   (apart from the Pratts addition  )

[Tony Griffiths]

It's surprising to find so many colourful "Motor Spirit" adverts. In case you're wondering, these are scattered across the internet, many on eBay, so I've saved, cleaned up, re-sized and arranged them into these sets. Don't forget to click on them for a clearer image.

[squeak]

Wow Tony, good effort.