Life — February 28, 1918 — page 6: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# Weed Chain-Jack Advertisement This page is primarily a **product advertisement**, not satire. It promotes the "Weed Chain-Jack," a mechanical lifting device for automobiles manufactured by American Chain Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The advertisement's humor comes from the caption: "Goodness, Daddy! You're Slow—The Car is Already Jacked Up!" The illustration shows a man manually changing a tire while a woman operates the chain-jack effortlessly, emphasizing the product's ease of use. The ad's selling point is that the device requires minimal physical effort—"It's Child's Play to Operate It"—allowing users to lift heavy cars by simply pulling a chain while standing upright. This represents early 20th-century marketing that combined practical innovation with gentle mockery of traditional manual labor.