Efforts to Make Improvements in Tire Industry

Last Updated on 27.04.2022 by hrushetskyy

DESPITE THE BEST EFFORTS of everybody in the tire business automotive tires in the first decade of the century left very much to be desired. A satisfactory replacement for solid truck tires had not been found. Pneumatic tires on passenger cars were unreliable. A short ride in the country without the necessity of having to change at least one tire was something you could boast about to your friends.

Skidding whenever the road surface was wet and too often when it wasn’t was something motorists were beginning to think would finally send people back to the horse and buggy. Horses seldom ran into trees while attempting to turn a corner and horses never spun their rear wheels as most automobiles did when going up a hill. Going downhill too often there was a two step disaster. First the brakes (only on the rear wheels) would lock and the car would skid on its tread-less tire. After it had skidded so far the abrasion of the road would rub through the thin rubber covering on the carcass and then through the thin layers of fabric (most commonly a cotton fabric known in the trade as “Duck E”) making up the carcass and then there would come the too familiar loud pop as the inner tube blew out. There are now tire manufacturers such as Nexen tires who make tires for different purposes, but in the early days of the tire industry, the most common problems had to be addressed.

Firestone was more concerned with the tendency of tires to skid than he was with their durability. He had people working on making tires more durable and he believed that time and experience would provide eventually a tire that would last as long as the car it was first mounted on. (Firestone and other tire engineers still have this fine idea dangling in front of them just about as far out of reach in the 1970s as it was in the 1900s.)

There had been all sorts of ideas to keep tires from skidding. The Leather Tire Goods Company of Niagara Falls New York for example marketed what it called Wood worth Treads. These were little rubber strips or little rubber bumps welded or riveted to the carcass. They either fell off or cut through the carcass to the tube both within a very few miles.

Other tires including one put out under the Swine-hart brand (Swine-hart was one of the original founders of Fire stone) had the outer tread marked in some fashion the Swine-hart with diamonds. Firestone thought that that idea having the non skid surface part of the tire was probably the best idea but that the technique of making such tires was too expensive. (The Swine-hart tires began as round smooth tires; the diamonds were cut into the tread.)

One morning Firestone called in a tool and dies maker and showed him a piece of paper on which he had written in block letters FIRESTONE NONSKID. He told the die maker to cut those two words one above the other at an angle into the vulcanizing mold. The rubber heated and under pressure would fill the holes in the mold.

Firestone’s idea produced several things: First of all a non skid surface that was part of the tire as the Swine-hart and other tires had been an improvement over rubber and leather bumps and strips. Secondly it offered because of the different shapes of the letters all kinds of angles to resist skidding. In any position there was always some part of the tread opposing a skid. And finally it said FIRESTONE and that couldn’t hurt a thing.

At about this time concerned with skidding as much as the Americans the French Michelin Tire Company came up with another approach to the problem. They studded their tires with metal points a technique that is still used on some snow tires. Because of the rubber then available the metal studded tires weren’t very successful. And Michelin proposed for no reason that has come down to us the following odd recommended installation in an early 1900s issue of Leslies Weekly Motorist’s Column.

“A good many motorists who use metal studded non skid tires will fit these tires to the rear wheels of their cars. A famous French tire manufacturer [Michelin was the only French manufacturer making metal studded tires at this time] declares this is not the best way. His advice is to fit one of the tires to one of the rear wheels and the other to a front wheel not on the same side of the car.”

Firestone of course was advocating the use of his Non-Skid tires on all four wheels and was quick to suggest politely that this odd method of installing tires was just another manifestation of French madness.

The same issue of Leslie’s had other advice for motorists regarding their tires: “Motorists who keep their cars in their own garages or stables ought to be especially careful about allowing oil or grease to get on their tires as grease softens rubber so that it wears out very rapidly. It is a good plan to wash the tires every day or so. Oil is bad not only for tire casings but for inner tubes as well. For this reason extra tubes should always be carried in cardboard boxes and never under any circumstances shoved into a tool box where’ they may come in contact with oily tools or oil cans.”

Oil and grease would work chemically to destroy the rubber in a tire carcass but the real problem was the construction of the tire itself. None of the large manufacturers no matter how much effort they spent no matter how much they paid to get the best materials to put into a tire could come up with a tire that would last more than a very few thousand miles under ideal circumstances. The best available tires failed after two and three thousand miles. Fire stone took full page advertisements in the largest weekly magazines and newspapers showing their Non-Skid tire and a drawing of an absolutely beside himself with joy motorist sending a telegram to his boss announcing that he had made a 3000 mile trip on just one set of tires.

Flats occurred so frequently that they weren’t counted. When they *spoke of mileage they meant the number of miles a tire could go before it was worn torn or shredded beyond repair. The fabric on the carcass was the villain. And an English company the Palmer Tire Company of Silver-town Village made the first breakthrough which they called the “cord’’ tire.

Instead of using the square woven cotton cloth “duck” which had fibers of equal dimensions woven at right angles they built a carcass of two layers of “cords. They were first impregnated with rubber and then laid from one bead to the other at right angles to the line of rotation. A layer of rubber between the two layers of cord provided a cushion.

Each of the cords was about as thick as a pencil lead. This manufacturing technique was expensive (a cord tire cost two or three times as much as a duck fabric tire) but the tires were much better in the sense that they were far more flexible. Flexibility without the heat generated in duck fabric tires meant that the carcass was far more durable.

The Goodrich Tire Company began to make the English tire calling it the Palmer tire. Next door to Goodrich’s Akron Ohio plant was the Diamond Rubber Company. One of its executives J. D. Tew was sent to England to learn the techniques of manufacturing a cord tire. When Diamond began to make a cord tire they called it the “Silver-town” after the name of the English village where the Palmer tire had originated.

Later Goodrich and Diamond merged. Tew became president of Goodrich and the cord tire put out by the newly merged companies became the Goodrich Silver town a trade name still in use a half century later.

Goodyear on the other hand while impressed with the Palmer tire and the idea behind it wasn’t overly impressed with the large sized cords. They developed a carcass with “cords” woven in the same way (from bead to bead). But instead of two layers of pencil lead thick cords Goodyear used four and even more layers of much thinner cords (Vz2 inch in diameter).

Goodrich and Diamond promptly announced that the Goodyear tire wasn’t a “cord tire” at all but just a “thread tire.” A rather interesting battle followed in the advertising columns of the newspapers with Goodrich and Goodyear bitterly arguing the definition of a “cord.”

Goodyear then took a page from Firestone’s book. Fire stone had turned to auto racing as Henry Ford had. People were willing to judge anything automotive on how well it did on the race track.

Since 1909 Harvey Firestone had had the foresight to see that just about all the cars racing at the first race over the Indianapolis Motor Speedway were riding on Firestone tires. His advertisements let no one forget that the victor of the first race at Indianapolis had been riding on Firestones.

There was no reason Goodyear decided that Firestone should have all that racing glory to themselves. They went to Ralph de Palma one of the old time racing greats and talked him into running Goodyear cord tires. The official Goodyear history coyly refers to De Palma as “a long time admirer of Goodyear tires” and reported that when he first ran Goodyear tires at Indianapolis “they stood the gaff.”

The official Firestone history on the other hand suggests that everybody who ever won at Indianapolis rolled across the finish line on Firestone tires.

By 1912 depending on which history of the tire business you read United States Goodrich or Diamond Rubber companies were the largest with Goodyear in fourth place and Firestone in fifth. (Firestone disputes this of course insisting they were right up there with the front runners.)

In the wings in 1912 was another fascinating character cast in the same mold as Seiberling Firestone and the others. This was William Francis O’Neil also of Akron Ohio.

When the early tire manufacturers bought their first Duck E for the body of their tire carcasses they had quite naturally gone to the largest dry goods store in the area the M. O’Neil Company. Michael O’Neil the proprietor was another turn of the century live wire who had an unlimited faith in the precepts of the Roman Catholic Church hard work and his own ability.

His was one of the first large department stores for example to install cash registers then just coming on the market. But he suspected that the use of machinery might make his employees lax in their handling of money and just to keep them on their toes procured a supply of counterfeit money which a handful of make believe customers would try to pass off in his store as the real thing.

His employees tolerated this odd practice and other odd practices for a very good reason. Michael O’Neil had an ironclad rule that no employee could ever be fired except for dishonesty. Drunks were sobered up malcontents charmed and the inept trained and trained again without ever losing a paycheck.

William Francis O’Neil was his son. He graduated from college in 1907 and instead of going into the family store as was expected of him took a job as a traveling salesman of trading stamps. He didn’t last long at this and by the Christmas season of 1907 was working in the store which he apparently didn’t like any better than the trading stamps business.

Early in 1908 W. O’Neil as he preferred to identify himself wrote Firestone a letter. He said that he heard a “territory” was available to sell their tires. He wanted to know how large the territory was and how much capital would be required of him in order to get it.

Firestone at the time was in its infancy. Anyone who wrote them about selling their product was going to receive their most serious consideration particularly someone who sounded as if he might actually have a little capital to put up. They made some discreet inquiries about W. O’Neil and began to smile.

W. O’Neil was the son of M. O’Neil whose credit was practically unlimited. (Four years later in 1912 M. O’Neil sold out to the May Company for $1000000 in cash plus a 25 year lease on the building.) Here indeed was a fine prospect to start selling Firestone tires. A Firestone executive got in touch with M. O’Neil and said they had a fine letter from such a fine young man and just how far could they expect M. O’Neil to back W. O’Neil? M. O’Neil said that he would look into the matter and get back to them.

Then he left his office and rushed home to confer with Mrs. M. O’Neil about the latest idiotic idea of their son. The question from the Firestone executive was the first hint M. O’Neil had had that W. O’Neil wasn’t perfectly happy with his role as heir apparent to a million dollar department store Empire.

M. O’Neil had taken great pride in knowing that W. O’Neil was a chip off the old block a near carbon copy of his father in matters of strength of character and determination. This pride grew a little painful when it became apparent that W. O’Neil’s strength of character was now to be applied to his determination to get into the tire business.

Neither calm fatherly advice nor a display of old fashioned Irish temper could dissuade him.

Finally the father gave in. He advanced his son $3500 which was both the son’s share of profit in the store during the time he had worked in it and the same figure with which years before the father had gone into business.

Once he had the commitment of the money (which meant really more than the cash. Everybody concerned understood that if W O’Neil failed in the tire business it would not be because he couldn’t raise additional capital from his father) W. O’Neil was perfectly willing to listen to his father’s business advice. His father’s advice was simple and practical. Since you don’t know the first thing about the credit part of running a business and you’re going into a business operating largely on credit what you need is a good credit man as a partner. W. O’Neil agreed both to the idea and the man his father proposed as his partner: Win Fred E. Fouse who was then Firestone’s credit manager.

The association between Fouse and W. O’Neil lasted just a few months short of half a century and at the end it wasn’t much different than it had been at the beginning.

Fouse tempered O’Neil’s Irish volatility with good common financial sense and O’Neil put a little life into Fouse’s financier’s temperament.

Will O’Neil and Win Fouse go into business as the Western Rubber & Supply Company at 1737 Grand Avenue in Kansas City on January of 1909? Grand Avenue was then “Automobile Row” one car dealer after another. Win Fouse stayed in town to service the local dealers and O’Neil went literally “on the road” traveling a three and a half state territory. Part of this was because of the two O’Neil was the better salesman. And part of it was because Fouse wanted to make sure that the man who placed an order for tires was going to pay for it. Big city merchants despite the size and opulence of their stores sometimes were terrible credit risks. The small town hardware merchants on the other hand had to keep up their credit rating to stay in business. Fouse reasoned it was wiser to apply O’Neil’s salesmanship to the hardware merchants.

O’Neil was more than a salesman. He was a first class merchandiser. When he looked around a country hardware store he saw that tires were either hidden in the back room with the plows or suspended from the ceiling next to the coils of barbed wire. This obviously wouldn’t do. People weren’t going to buy anything unless they could see it.

So 0 Neil invented the tire display rack. The first rack was simply an arrangement of pipes on which a tire could be hung and displayed. During the day it could be placed on the sidewalk outside the store a reminder that the store not only sold tires but sold Firestone tires. In the evening the tire and its rack would be carried inside the store.

There were two things wrong with the first models of the display rack. The winds roaring across the prairie would knock the signs down from time to time and unless the Boss was there to watch clerks would sometimes forget to bring the tire and racks in at the close of business which resulted in the frequent loss of tires and sometimes the rack as well.

The wind problem was solved by weighting the base of the rack and the theft problem by the addition of a chain and padlock.

The second model of the display rack is in daily use today virtually unchanged from O’Neil’s design. If he had taken the trouble to patent the device it alone would have made him a rich man. But he wasn’t interested in patents he was interested in moving merchandise and applied all of his thought to that.

He had learned from working in his father’s store and he now applied part of a standard show salesman s technique to the tire business. He encouraged his dealers to set up a service area and offer“free inspection” of a customer’s tires.

“Isn’t the customer going to know whether or not he needs tires?” the dealers would counter. “What’s the first thing a shoe salesman does when you sit down?” O’Neil would reply. “He takes off your shoes that are what he does. A man with only one shoe on isn’t going to run out of a store. Neither is a potential tire customer after you’ve taken the tires off his car.”

“Free Inspection” services quickly became a standard function of O’Neil’s tire dealers. Next he turned his attention to spare tires. Cars in those days mounted their spare tires (and it was generally tires not just a tire) on the outside of the body either on the back behind what was then really a trunk or in wells on the front fenders. What better way to get some more free advertising W. O’Neil reasoned and build some customer good will at the same time than by giving out absolutely free of charge a fine looking rubberized artificial leather tire boot to keep the spare tires clean or to hide worn out tires good enough for a spare but hardly things of beauty and a joy forever against a shiny fender? Each of the free tire boots carried the name of the tire O’Neil was selling.

With those practical matters out of the way O’Neil turned to the product itself. He looked at the tire of the time and found it wanting and a little absurd. Man had taken three of the softest things in nature rubber cotton cloth and air combined them (by inflation almost to the bursting point) into something as hard as iron and which made this hardness evident every time the car rolled over a bump.

The alternative was a tire with a wider tread (which would also give a better “foot” or traction) of heavier construction necessary because it would not be inflated to such high pressures. It would give a softer ride but it would be more expensive.

Fouse was not very enthusiastic about selling a much more expensive tire but O’Neil went again to his department store experience. He told Fouse that he had noticed in the tie department that if people had the money they would pass up the one dollar and two dollar neckties for the five dollar neckties for the prestige involved as much as for the higher quality. He could see no reason why this phenomenon couldn’t be applied to the tire business as well.

Make a good tire and charge what was necessary for it and make sure it was readily recognizable as a high priced tire (by the kind of sidewall or special lettering or some such) and people would buy it and be satisfied with it.

When the tie department story didn’t seem to make much of an impression on Fouse O’Neil reminded him that people were buying the most expensive automobiles they could afford. Few people who could afford Lincolns drove Fords. That settled the argument.

The arguments with Firestone however were just beginning. While there was no question that O Neil and Fouse were making money for Firestone there was the question in Firestone s mind about how much money Firestone could make for Firestone if O’ Neil and Fouse weren’t in the middle.

As sort of a hedge against the day when there would be a full scale blowup with Firestone Western Tire & Rubber Company went into the manufacturing business not of tires but of the then common spare and repair parts for tires. They started to manufacture tire re-liners blow out boots patches and the like.

Fouse thought that going into manufacturing was a good common sense business decision. It was diversification for one thing and at the same time would give them a stock of material for which there was a steady demand and which they now had to buy from other people. O’Neil agreed with all this but his major pleasure in entering the manufacturing business was to learn how to make things out of rubber. He had every intention of making his own tires even if this wasn’t quite the time to tell Fouse who worried a lot about it.

The reason Firestone no longer wanted O’Neil was that O’Neil was a little too good a tire salesman. People who are good and know they are good and can prove it are in a position to do things the way they want to do them and to set their own price for doing it. This didn’t sit well with Firestone but O’Neil seemed to be the answer to other people’s problems. The McGraw Tire Company then as familiar a name in the tire business as say General Tire & Rubber is today offered O’Neil $25000 a year plus 10 per cent of the profits to manage their company which then had gross sales of over ten million dollars a year.

O’Neil turned them down although his business was then in a precarious infancy. He wanted his own tire company. He did make one deal with McGraw however. He took an entire carload of tires off their hands for $700. They hadn’t been able to sell the tires and for some time O’Neil couldn’t sell them either. Then he made a deal with a hardware store owner in Missouri: He swapped the tires for twenty acres of swamp in Florida. Years later the property by then inside the Miami city limits was sold for $55000 a great deal of money at that time, while there was no question in his own mind about his ability as a salesman neither was there much question about the toughest customer around one that he would have to sell if his dream of his own tire manufacturing company was to be realized. The only place he could get the kind of money he needed to get started was from his father and his father had grown rich and stayed rich by being an extremely cautious investor.

Early in 1915 Will O’Neil got on the train and headed for Akron. He and Fouse had had a good year. They had made quality tire repair products and sold enough of them at a sufficient profit to make a lot of money. They had paid themselves $300 a month as salary and split the profits right down the middle. They had each earned more than $25000 for a year’s work which was an enormous amount of money in those days. But O’Neil realized that as the quality of tires rose his repair parts business must necessarily sink.

Will O’Neil suspected that his father would suspect and accuse him of using this cold fact of business life to mask the “truth” the truth being that shortly after going into business with borrowed money here he was again with his hand out to borrow some more.

Before he went home he went by the O’Neil store now owned and managed by Nate L. Dauby president of the May Company. While he was making a sort of sentimental tour around the store in which he had worked as a boy and younger man he ran into Dauby. Dauby led him into what had once been Michael O Neil s office and made him a proposition. If Will O Neil would take over management of the O’Neil store Dauby would pay him $25000 a year and give him a percentage of the profits.

O Neil realized that Nate L. Dauby and his father were the same kind of men. He reasoned that if he could sell Dauby on a counterproposal of investing in a tire company he could probably sell his father as well. He took a deep breath and launched into his sales pitch. An hour later he walked out of Dauby’s office with Dauby’s promise to take $10000 worth of stock.

For whatever reasons (whether because Will was after all his son; or because Dauby was willing to invest; or because Will had made $25000 the year before in the tire business) Michael O’ Neil broke out his checkbook. But this time there were some restrictions. Michael O’Neil would be president and will well know that meant he would try to run the company. Between the father and the son they would control the company.

Win Fouse and Will O’Neil sold their tire company to the new as yet unnamed company for $50000 worth of stock one quarter of the $200000 capitalization, but what to call the new company? The obvious thing to call it was the O’Neil Tire Company but there was an interesting problem here. In Akron a man named William O’Neil (no relation at all although his wife had been a cashier at the M. O’Neil store) owned a small tire company called the O’Neil Tire & Protector Company. The major product of that company had been a tire protector very much like the tire protectors sold with such success by O’Neil and Fouse’s Western Rubber Company. The possibilities of rampant confusion were evident and another name would be needed.

Then as now the giants of American industry included General Foods General Mills General Motors and General Electric. The word “General” had a nice ring to it in Will O’Neil’s ear and the tiny new tire company capitalized at $200000peanuts compared to the investment in any of the other “General” companies was incorporated in September 1915 as the General Tire & Rubber Company. It was the three hundred fifty eighth tire company to be formed in America.

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