TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 825 The U.S. Tire Industry: A History. By Michael J. French. Boston: Twayne (G. K. Hall), 1991. Pp. xvii+156; tables, bibliography, index. $22.95 (cloth); $11.95 (paper). From the discovery of rubber and its uses among the natives of South America, there blossomed in Europe in the early 19th century the manufacture of such rubber items as erasers, cloth, and shoes. Later it was used on wagon and carriage wheels and, at the turn of the 20th century, on the newly invented bicycle and automobile. By the end of the First World War, as the automobile became less “a rich man’s toy,” the mass-produced auto tire dominated the tire market, and it has maintained that position down to the present. As the industry trod the path of America’s economic trends in war and peace, a continually diminishing number of increasingly larger firms came to dominate. By 1921, there were only five heavily capitalized makers of original equipment (OE) tires for new autos— Goodyear, Goodrich, Firestone, U.S. Rubber, and Fisk. This compet itive oligopoly found it difficult to cooperate so as to monopolize the industry. As their plants were not used to capacity for much of the year, the oligopoly vied with numerous small tire makers in the replacement tire market on used cars and also in the lesser, but constantly expanding, markets of tires for bicycles, motorcycles, trucks, buses, airplanes, racers, farm and industrial machinery, and, more recently, the off-road and snow vehicles of the leisure world. This intense rivalry has resulted in driving most of the small manu facturers out of business. Further, by the late 1980s the oligopoly has become multinationalized and has largely fallen out of American hands. It was technology that made it possible to quickly design and mass-produce tires for all the vehicles created in the 20th century. Primarily out of European workshops came the early important methods of tire making such as rim clamping, tread design, ply bias, pneumatic presses, and the compounding and mixing of rubber. Out of American laboratories during World War II came synthetic rubber. Later developments, from home and abroad, were tubeless tires, two-ply bias, radials, and belted tires. The one piece of technology American firms were slow to adopt was the radial. This delay was the chief reason the oligopoly lost control of the domestic auto tire markets and of itself. The radial was invented in France prior to World War II, but in the postwar era it was ignored by the American auto giants. Meanwhile, the Europeans and Japanese developed it for their car markets. A mid-1960s slump in sales led the automakers to the belated adoption of the radial tire. This sudden, great demand for radials, which the oligopoly could not meet, once again drew foreign tire makers into the OE market where they had not been since the Depression. In later recessions, auto manufacturers abandoned the production of lower-priced, small vehicles. The Eu 826 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE ropeans and Japanese took over this market, and with the imported cars came imported tires. The heavy debt incurred by the OE firms to finance the switch to radials was intensified by poor sales years during the stagflation of the 1980s and caused them to restructure to raise funds. Strengthened by the actions of raiding financiers, firms sold off parts of the tire industry. The buyers were often foreign tire companies. Today, Goodyear is the only American-owned OE manufacturer. The U.S. tire oligopoly has become one of the transnational portions of the developing global economy. The role of technology in the migration of the tire industry is another vivid illustration for a theme of severing local ties. The previous existence of the rubber industry made Akron, Ohio, a hub of the tire industry. Given the technology, tire building was a skilled craft, and mistakes caused costly losses from throwaways. The tire builders earned high wages, and many rubber workers migrated to the tire plants. The trade also required muscle; tires weigh a lot. For these reasons the rise of unions rested on issues like the speedup and the...