Life, 1920-08-05 · page 47 of 48
Life — August 5, 1920 — page 47: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is primarily **advertising content**, not satire or political commentary. It's a U.S. Rubber Company advertisement promoting their pneumatic truck tires. The page argues that unlike regular car owners who absorb tire failures as personal loss, truck owners need reliable tires because failures directly impact their business. The ad positions U.S. Rubber as the responsible company that invested two years developing specialized truck tires—not simply enlarging passenger car tires—and crucially, **never charged truck owners for these experiments**. The implicit contrast is with competitors who apparently do pass experimental costs onto customers. The ad emphasizes that U.S. Rubber bears development expenses themselves and only releases products meeting exacting standards, even if this means some tire sizes remain unavailable until perfected. The illustration shows enormous truck tires framing an industrial harbor scene, emphasizing scale and industrial durability—the stakes of reliable trucking infrastructure.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
WHO PAYS FOR PNEUMATIC TRUCK TIRE EXPERIMENTS HEN an _ automobile owner's tire goes back on him he more or less cheerfully charges it off as a personal loss and tries to do better next time. It is different with the motor truck owner. Every tire must do exactly what is expected of it or be charged against his business. * * & Experimenting with tires is not the job of the truck owner. The United States Rubber Company spent two years in developing the idea of putting a heavy truck on air before it brought out the first pneumatic truck tires. Even then it was not satisfied. Even at that time it saw that you could not take an ordinary Passenger car tire, enlarge it and make it do what truck owners expect of their tires. It went back again to first brinciples—to the foundation— to the bead of the tire. It created a new type of bead construction, positively anchor- ing the cords. It put in the right number of breaker strips, stronger side walls, a heavier tread, The result was a pneumatic truck tire—not an enlarged pas- senger car tire. Created to fill a need—not padded and bol- stered up to fill a market al- ready created. * * # There are still some sizes of U. S. Nobby Cord Tires you cannot buy. The market is there waiting for them. But they will not be epee until this company is satis that they will do what rent owners expect of them. The United States Rubber Company has never asked truck owners to pay for its tire experiments. U.S. Pneumatic Truck Tires United States Fifty-three Factories PN (Uy) The oldest and largest. Rubber Organization in the World Rubber Company Two hundred and thirty-five Branches comicbooks.com