Life, 1923-12-06 · page 75 of 84
Life — December 6, 1923 — page 75: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is **not a cartoon or satire**—it's a straightforward advertisement for U.S. Royal Cord Tires, published in *Life* magazine (which contained both humor and ads). The page features a large illustration of a tire against a geometric diamond-patterned background, designed to catch readers' attention. The ad addresses a genuine practical concern: winter tire failures were common and dangerous in the early automotive era, and changing a tire in freezing conditions was genuinely unpleasant. The advertisement sells Royal Cord tires by highlighting three technical advantages (Web Cord construction, Flat Band Method manufacturing, and Sprayed Rubber composition) as solutions to winter driving problems—flexing over frozen roads while maintaining durability. This reflects the era when tire quality directly affected safety and reliability, making tire brand loyalty a significant consumer decision.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
How thousands of Car Owners will avoid Tire trouble this winter great increase in winter driving of closed cars is demanding more and more Royal Cord equipment. Nothing is much more unpleasant than making a tire change when the weather nips your fingers and the roads are covered with ice, snow, slush or mud. Thousands of car owners avoid it by equip- ping with Royal Cords all around before the cold weather sets in. A Royal Cord combats winter hardships, flexing easily over the ruts and bumps of frozen roads, and maintains its vitality because— 1. It’s built of Web Cord which has no cross tie-threads and is thoroughly impreg- nated with pure rubber latex. 2. It is built by the Flat Band Method which insures that each individual cord bears its proportionate share of the load. 3. It is built of Sprayed Rubber, the first uniformly pure rubber ever used in tire manufacture. These advantages and the anti-skid pro- tection of the famous Royal Cord Tread can only be obtained from the dealer in U. S. Royal Cords. United States Tires are Good Tires U. S. Royal Cord Tires United States @ Rubber Company comicbooks.com