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How My Grandpa Helped Invent Dually Tires

by Sterling D. Allan
Nov. 27, 2003

SPRINGVILLE, UT USA

The mid to early 1900's saw a different breed of do-it-yourself, make-due, can-do attitude than what is prevalent today, when everything is handed to us pre-packages, disposable, and mass produced.

Here's a story about my own grandfather that I heard for the first time just a few days ago, and here I am nearly 40 years old.

Back in the early '30s, my grandfather, Sylvester (Smuss) Allan, Grant Minor, and their buddy Bliss Childs, all from the Springville Utah area, took their wives and drove out to Detroit and bought three Ford dump trucks -- one each -- and one car, to take back to Utah with them. They wanted to get into the business of hauling rocks to solidify road beds.

While in Detroit, picking up their trucks, they had an idea to put two tires on each side in the back rather than one, and to use pneumatic (inner-tube) tires rather than the solid rubber tires that heavy vehicles used at that time.

All of the major automobile manufacturers they approached with this idea shoed them away saying that was a stupid idea.  Besides, what did these hicks from Utah known, that their highly educated engineers did not know?

Firestone also said it would not work, but they agreed to at least help them fit their vehicles with the tires, putting necessary spacing between the two tires on each side so they would not rub against one another.

When they got back to Utah, they paid for the trucks in 28 days because their trucks could go so much faster than those that had solid rubber tires and could only go 15 miles per hour. They were paid by the load.

The automobile manufacturers send some people to check up on them, and about a year after this three-some had been in Detroit, the major automobiles announced a brand new improvement on their line of trucks -- duelly tires.

Now, as Paul Harvey would say, you know the rest of the story.

Feedback

Proof of Duelly Tire Concept in 1928

To those of us interested in the history of technology, and thereby, the history of invention, the beginning of any technology acting as a watershed in determining future industrial development, is always intriguing.

I'm referencing two books as I write. The first:

             "A Source Book of Commercial Vehicles"
               Research: Dennis N. Miller
               Edited: Bart H. Vanderveen
               publ. Ward Rock Limited
                     116 Baker Street
                     London, W1M 2BB
               revised 1976
               ISBN - 0 7063 1286 4

On Page 30 of the above, a photograph of a 1911 Berliet "CAT" type truck, cab and chassis, is shown.
It has *dual* *solid-tire* rear wheels. Also shown on Page 31 is a photograph of a 1911 FBW truck with box body, clearly, with dual solid-tire wheels. I see a 1913 British Daimler cab and flat-bed vehicle on Page 32, also with dual solid-tire wheels. Photographs on subsequent pages show commercial vehicles with dual solid-tire wheels, all pre-1921. On Page 41, you'd be interested in the 1920 cab-and-chassis  *Sterling*, built in Milwaukee, with dual solid-tire wheels.

The second book:

            "The London Motor Bus - Its Origins and Development"
             by J. Graeme Bruce and C.H. Curtis
             publ. 1973 - London Transport
                          55 Broadway
                          Westminster SW1
             ISBN O 85329 036 9            

shows on P.3, Plate 50, a London NS-type, double-decker bus with rear, *pneumatic* tires. Because of the concave appearance of the outer rear wheel's hub, the wheels are probably *dual* pneumatic. This model of bus began production in 1923, and the last of the type were built in 1930. Though originally "specced" with dual solid-tire wheels, the following excerpt from P. 28 of the above book indicates that some buses were probably refitted with dual pneumatic tires during 1928:

    "In July 1928 the regulations concerning London buses were amended so that it was
     then possible to fit the 4-wheeled 'NS' type with pneumatic tyres.......Only a small
     number of these improved 'NS' type buses were built, although most of the original
     open-toppers were rebuilt with covered tops and subsequently fitted with pneumatic tyres."

Your grandfather and his friends may have been the first to actually outfit their trucks with dual rear pneumatic tires. However, if we can believe the above excerpt, it seems that transport organizations elsewhere had plans afoot, and the technological mentality, to install dual rear "pneumatic" tires on trucks and buses well before July 1928, although they may not actually have been installed before your grandfather and his friends did so. I think this idea was well entrenched amongst mechanical types before the early 1930's.

Sincerely,

Hal Ade
Ottawa,ON.

Page posted by Sterling D. Allan, Nov. 27, 2003
Last updated November 17, 2006