Life, 1912-08-01 · page 29 of 40
Life — August 1, 1912 — page 29: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a **straightforward advertisement**, not satire. The page promotes Kelly-Springfield automobile tires through *Life* magazine (which ran both humor and ads). The visual shows a woman in early 20th-century dress sitting inside a large tire, likely meant to convey the tire's durability and quality. The accompanying text emphasizes the company's manufacturing expertise—seventeen years of experience in rubber composition—as the key to tire longevity. The marketing claim ("no way on earth to make a pneumatic tire that will give more mileage and better service") reflects early automotive-era competition when tire quality was a genuine consumer concern and competitive differentiator. The multiple branch offices and affiliated rubber companies listed suggest Kelly-Springfield's national reach during this period of American industrial expansion.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Kelly-Springfield Tire Co. 20 Vesey St., New York Branch offices in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, St. Louis, Detroit, Cincinnati, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Baltimore, Washington, Seattle, Atlanta, Akron, O., Buffalo Boss Rubber Co., Denver, Colo. Appel & Burwell Rubber & Tire Co., Dallas, Texas ering Tire & Rubber Co., Houston, Texas Todd Rubber Co., New Haven, Conn. Kelly-Springfield Automobile Tires The wear you get out of a tire depends absolutely on the wear the factory puts into it. The wear the factory puts into a tire de- pends in turn on the composition of rubber that is used in the making. The experience of seventeen years of rubber tire manufacture has gone directly into perfecting the rubber composition used in Kelly-Springfield Automobile Tires. We have reason to believe that there is no way on earth to make a pneumatic tire that will give more mileage and better serv- ice under actual road conditions than the Kelly-Springfield. Kelly-Springfield Tire Company 20 Vesey St., New York comicbooks.com