Whitewall tires are an interesting historical oddity, peaking in popularity between the 1950s and 1970s. As popular as they once were, I have not found an accurate, comprehensive online history of whitewall tires, so once again it falls upon CC to set the record straight.
The roots of whitewall tires go back much farther than most people realize, almost to the dawn of the horseless carriage era. Over the next several installments I’ll study the rise and fall of this styling phenomenon, but today we’ll start with the early origins of whitewall tires.
1912 Ford Model T with zinc white tires
In the very beginning, all tires were milky, semi-translucent ivory color because that is the natural color of untreated rubber. Manufacturers soon discovered that by adding a little zinc oxide to the raw rubber they could get that bright gleaming white that we typically associate with brass-era tires, and nominally improve the durability as well.
But before we can get to true white sidewall tires, two innovations from the early days of 20th-century tire manufacturing would have to come together: carbon black tires and cord tires. Let’s take a quick look at each innovation separately, starting with cord tires.
Cord Tires
Pneumatic tires date back to the bicycle craze of the late 19th century. At that time, tire carcasses were typically reinforced with fabric swatches (if they were reinforced at all). Around 1890, J.F. Palmer came up with the idea of a “puncture-proof” tire reinforced with cords (essentially threads or strings), which proved to be much more durable than woven fabric. Palmer patented the idea for cord bicycle tires in 1893 and licensed it to various bicycle tire manufacturers worldwide, including B. F. Goodrich.
Worn tire showing cords. Image courtesy Wikicommons
Although the cords are now made of nylon and steel, this technique is still fundamental to tire construction today, to which anyone who has ever had a blowout or worn a tire “down to the cords” can attest.
Starting in 1904, Christian Gray at the India Rubber Company wondered if the Palmer principle of cord tires to be applied to the emerging market of automobile tires, and took out over a dozen patents for cord-reinforced automobile tires. In 1909, the Diamond Rubber Co. in Akron (maker of Silvertown tires, a brand we will return to shortly) purchased exclusive US rights to these patents. In 1912, B.F. Goodrich purchased the Diamond Rubber Co. and acquired these patent licenses. If you are wondering how all this relates to whitewall tires, hear me out.
Carbon Black
Carbon has been used as a strengthening and reinforcing agent since antiquity, when it was discovered that when carbon was added to molten iron it forms steel. Over the millennia, experimenters have experimented with adding carbon to many materials in an effort to strengthen them.
B.F. Goodrich is often credited with inventing carbon black tires in 1910, but this is clearly not true, as we shall see. The earliest reference to adding carbon black (a fine, sooty form of carbon that is a combustion byproduct) I could find was in 1904, with Sidney Charles Mote using it at the London-based India Rubber Company. Even this reference doesn’t claim ownership of this process, claiming that adding carbon black to strengthen rubber was “generally known.” This is backed up by the fact that no one appears to have ever patented this process.
While carbon black certainly improves the heat dissipation and longevity of automotive tires, these benefits were likely academic at the speeds and distances that most brass-era cars were being driven. This is one of the reasons that all-white tires were still seen on cars into the late teens and early 1920s. Likewise, the longer wear life of black tires would be of little use if your tire was going to succumb to a fatal puncture long before the treads were worn out. The benefit of black tires (improved heat resistance and longer tread life) would not be fully realized until combined with corded tires (for better puncture resistance) and the faster, heavier cars of the teens and twenties.
So while BF Goodrich did not invent black tires (which were likely independently invented many times), they were among the first to commercialize them, since their acquisition of Diamond Rubber gave them access to the cord tire patents that made black tires practical.
Whitewall Tires – Putting it all together
1918 BF Goodrich Ad
You can’t have black tires with a white sidewall until you have black tires. Once carbon black rubber tires became available, they were generally all black, sidewalls and tread.
At this point, I’d like to debunk a myth about early whitewall tires. Some internet sources claim that whitewall tires were initially offered as a less expensive alternative to all-black tires, since only the treads required the carbon black process, but this doesn’t jibe with the historical facts. For starters, the cost of carbon black (basically soot) was essentially zero, since it was a byproduct of burning coal and would have been abundant. Any increase in the cost of black tires over white ones was the result of opportunistic pricing and perceived value, not because of increased manufacturing costs.
More to the point, if whitewall tires were ever actually sold for less than blackwalls, historical photos would be full of them, since as we all know Americans love a good bargain. But look at any urban picture from before 1930, and the vast majority of the cars are rolling on blackwall tires. If anything, whitewall tires likely cost more to manufacture than blackwalls, since you are now assembling the tire out of multiple pieces of different kinds of rubber.
1922 BF Goodrich Silvertown tire ad
No, whitewall tires were always a premium product, probably none more so than Diamond Rubber’s Silvertown tire brand. This continued to be the case under Goodrich’s ownership. Silvertowns were almost always advertised with white sidewalls, often with the two red diamonds as a throwback to the Diamond Rubber logo. The Silvertown brand would become synonymous with premium whitewall tires over the next half-century.
1922 BF Goodrich Silvertown Ad
Just how premium were they? Check out the 1922 ad above. Wow! Look at those prices. And those are reduced by 20 percent! Those actually aren’t too far removed from modern tire prices – I bought a set of tires for my son’s car for $82 apiece not too long ago. Those Silvertown Cord prices would range from $448 to $1,131 in 2023 adjusted dollars. Yes, you can spend over $1,000 per tire in 2023, but it is pretty exotic cars that require that kind of expensive rubber.
So up until the 1920’s, whitewall tires were a niche, premium product aimed at the replacement tire market. But anyplace where the aftermarket is making money, OEMs are sure to follow, and it wasn’t long before manufacturers started offering whitewalls as original equipment, as we shall see in Part 2.
Full Series
Automotive History – The History of Whitewall Tires, Part 1: The Teens and Twenties
Automotive History – The History of Whitewall Tires, Part 2: 1920s and 1930s
Automotive History – The History of Whitewall Tires, Part 4: 1964 through 1969 – The Wild ’60s
Automotive History – The History of Whitewall Tires, Part 5: 1970s through 1990s – The Long Goodbye
White Side Wall Tires! My single claim to fame, is that in the 50 plus years that I have owned and driven cars, I have never had a car with common black wall tires. All of my cars and even light trucks have had white wall tires. I have never owned a black wall tire!
Now the white wall width varies. For example my 2017 Holden Caprice came from the factory with 19 inch tires which provides only a small side wall. In this case, the white wall width is a little under half an inch.
But the point I am making, is almost all passengers look better with a white line on the side wall of the there tires. Black wall tires look terrible!
And in my 50+ years that I have owned and driven cars, I have never had a car with whitewalls! 🙂
I once got a great deal on some NOS Goodyear Double Eagles for my Corvair in 1973, but I insisted that they be mounted blackwall out. I wanted to imagine that they were a set of expensive European radials.
Did your thrifty father pony up for whitewalls for the Fairlane, Dart or Coronet wagon?
No!
I never thought about it, but I’ve never had whitewalls either. My first car came with worn, blackwall bias plies which I replaced with black wall radials very quickly. All my subsequent vehicles have had radials, though I will confess to having a few with raised white letters; on most of those when I bought new tires they were either all-black or I had the new tires mounted with the white letters in.
Add another to the “never owned whitewalls” list. In my case, it was because every car I ever owned was some GT, or Rally, or Sport variant, and white wall tires was anathema to the look. The only possibllity where I could be mistaken was the ’86 Buick Century Estate Wagon (wood sides, velour interior, fake wire wheel hubcaps) that was my mother’s when she died, and it was essentially forced on my (plus my ’82 Escort GT was getting unreliable). Gawd, I hated that car! But I don’t remember it having whitewalls despite all the other gawdawful styling touches.
I recall white wall tires on my parents’ 71 Chrysler, and I think I purchased a few sets for my ’71 Buick when I first owned it back in the early 80s. But after that, the only time I got white walls was when they were somehow on sale and I requested that they be mounted white-side-in. Sometimes, it was necessary to make up a set of 4 new tires with one or two that were white walls, and so those were mounted white-side-in so as to match the non-white tires.
But really, I haven’t even thought about white wall tires in nearly 40 years.
I’ve owned cars with both white & black wall tires. In my early car ownership days, cheap ruled. Tires were replaced individually with used tires only when they would no longer hold air. Having tread across the whole tire was a plus. Coming close to matching sizes was a real bonus.
On occasion, I was even able to match sidewall color on the same side of the car. I always tried to keep the blacks to the curb side and the whites to the driver side.
I was in Rob’s shoes for many years, always digging behind Service Stations for decent used tires I could drag away free and mount at my work .
In my teens I managed to get a 1954 Pontiac Super Chief Coupe ~ it was a marvelous car fully optioned and *very* heavy ~ I like ti always have five good tires as I’m often needing to travel on the spare so I found a nice service station on the edge of San Marino, a wealthy suburb, they sold lots of big car tires so I was always able to find good of near bald top quality cast offs that lasted a decent while .
Eventually I was able to move up to recaps, I don’t think anyone does that anymore .
My Mexican mates used to say ‘Nate’s trucks/cars look like they’re on powdered doughnuts’ because once I could afford them I’d always buy the widest wide white walls I could find .
-Nate
Not only have I never owned a car with whitewalls, I’ve never known anyone who did have a car with a set. Aside from the occasional car show, I haven’t seen them since I was a kid. Just not common down here.
I am not certain where ‘down here’ is, but if it is Australia that you are referring to, then your absolutely right white wall tires were rare in Australia during the 1950s, 1960s & 1970s. They were available, if you looked for them, but many tire retailers were not aware of them.
General Motors Holden (GMH) fitted white wall tires to its high end luxury Chevrolets and Pontiacs from 1965 and to its ‘mass market Holden’ from 1962 when the first Holden ‘Premier’ appeared in the EJ series.
Many point out the extra effort needed to clean the white walls, however I would argue strongly that correctly cleaning the side walls of tires takes the same effort regardless of the tire being a black wall or white wall.
Shiny Tire Dressings and Tire Black applicators do not clean the rubber, they simply mask or cover up the dirt. The correct method of cleaning a tire wall, be it back or white wall, requires scrubbing the tire wall with hot soapy water. Soap impregnated steel wool works well. A correctly cleaned tire wall should not have polished appearance.
So what do you think of black wheels that are all the rage nowadays ?
In a word, I absolutely ‘hate’ common garden variety black wall tyres.
I will never buy ‘black walls’. White Side Walls every time for me.
Of course the width of the white wall depends on the age of the car. More recent 18, 19, 20 inch tyres only allow quite narrow band white walls, but thats OK and better than no white wall at all.
I guess I can write the opposite lol never saw the any reason for the extra expense & work to keep them clean ?, ( as I had to clean the big WW on my father’s 34 Packard ) and on his high end cars modern cars too ! Me being into performance cars it make no sense & if you lived were you had curves to park next to you had extra scrubbing ! lol actually no lol just more work but if you look at Duisenberg Rolls & Benz these were very high-end cars more original fotos show them with backwalls So more sacrilegious I put blackwalls on my 61 caddy convertible ( as these cars have the most beautiful wheel covers that need to be not out staged ) well sorry if I offend just my input on a rainy day
Within a few years in the nineties whitewalls went from being practically ubiquitous to gone. Never have seen an option that was so popular disappear so quickly. The vinyl roof is another example of this, but whitewalls were far more popular for far longer. Seems that Mercedes and BMW dropped them first and suddenly they were no longer cool. U.S. manufacturers then started offering their optional performance tire upgrades in blackwall only. In short order the tire manufacturers stopped offering them and they were gone.
With you on that. My first car that I got to drive was an ’81 Dodge Omni Miser that still had its’ white-stripe tires as a 10 year old car (not the original ones), which made the whole thing so much more dated and dorky than it would’ve been.
I couldn’t afford to have them turned inside-out let alone new tires so I just let them get as dirty as possible so they’d kind of blend in.
Back in the early 1960s…
I purchased a set of triple white wall tires at M. Wards to be installed on my 1960 Chev Impala. I can recall that side walls with different colors where also available in the 1950s
they were rare to see.
Yep. I recall small red strips being popular on a few cars as late as the 60s.
There were also blue stripes. I think both of those (red and blue) were just painted white walls…although the blue ones more often just white walls with some kind of protective coating that was intended to be taken off. Never had any of those personally.
Great story! But I have to disagree with both Carl and Steve. To me, WWs were a 50s and 60s thing. Not anymore. But Steve…..a 61 Caddy with blackwalls? No, no, no, no!!!!
Dear Tom, your history of tires is of great interest. Indeed, I have found little information that I could regard as accurate when I search the internet. Growing up knowing “B.F. Goodrich Silvertown” as a marque for tires, now I have learned the origins of this name. I look forward to your next installments of this history. In the 1960’s and 1970’s I had a vehicle on which I had blue stripe tires. It was the time of red strip and gold stripe as well. Do any of you remember multi-stripe tires?
Patience. We will get to both colored stripe and multiple stripe tires later this week (each actually has its own post).
I should have known (before I brought up the colored ones in an above comment)! 🙂
Great article Tom. You constantly fascinate me with the stuff you find to cover.
I remember the blue stripe tires, but I can’t recall what car they came on. I do remember the redlines came first on the 64 GTO.
Within a few years in the nineties whitewalls went from being practically ubiquitous to gone. Never have seen an option that was so popular disappear so quickly. The vinyl roof is another example of this, but whitewalls were far more popular for far longer. Seems that Mercedes and BMW dropped them first and suddenly they were no longer cool. U.S. manufacturers then started offering their optional performance tire upgrades in blackwall only. In short order the tire manufacturers stopped offering them and they were gone.
I guess the only place to get WWs today is the collectible car market.
No, not necessarily. I just checked, and I could order up a set of whitewall tires for my 1976 Volvo wagon from Tire Rack. Hummmmmmmm…..
There aren’t a lot of options available so far as brand and size, but they’re out there.
For the longest time you could (and for some tire sizes I think you still can) get regular Firestone and Hankook passenger-car tires with whitewalls, and I used to put them on my little white Toyota pickup (always had to make sure the tire guy put the correct side out), just for the novelty of it, and also it made it easier to pick out in a parking lot from all the other little white Toyota pickups.
My father grew up in the Great Depression, during which going to the movies was a cheap form of escapism. One popular genre of film in the era was Gangster movies. Gangsters were revered in a certain way, as men who had come up from the bottom and helped the common man stand up against the Fat Cats.
And these gangsters drove big, black cars with whitewall tires. So lots of boys and young men of the era grew up aspiring to such fancy cars. Now that generation of men is all but gone, and so are their whitewall tires to which they aspired.
Even if so, the gangsters were likely aping the Hollywood set!
So, I just spent 24 minutes watching this clip. WHAT A CAR! Thanks for putting this on the site.
Me too! I live a mere three counties away from this car’s birthplace, but had never known about McFarlan! What a fabulous car!
Me too! 🙂
Including spending time looking at the website for “Historic Connersville” (IN) as I have to be about an hour west of there in a few weeks and am now wondering if I should go see the birthplace of McFarlan.
I am really looking forward to this series! The correct whitewall can really make a car, and the wrong one can ruin it. I will confess that I kind of miss the whitewall tire.
I had always heard of Goodrich Silvertown tires, but it is great to know how the name came about. This is an excellent answer to how tire manufacturers came to blend the white tire and the black tire.
Great introduction – I’m looking forward to the rest of the series!
It’s amazing how a styling trend from about 1920 managed to stay popular for about seven decades before suddenly collapsing.
My elderly buddy bought a new Porsche in 1956 and took it racing .
The nest tires he could find at that time had 3″ white walls and he took a lot of ribbing fro they other guys .
Me, I like ‘Gangster Wide Whites’ and had a set custom made for my 1949 Chevy 3100series shop truck, they gripped like the had asphalt magnets and the 4″ wide whites looked good even after 40,000 + hard miles of hauling and towing squishing through greasy junkyards and sandy Desert roads .
Not for everyone but glad they’re still available .
In the 1990’s (?) there was a brief fad of blue, yellow or red strips in the treads, I hope to read about those in the future articles .
-Nate
Whire wall tires were more expensive that black, and thus, they were often standard equipment on luxury cars, or for people who wanted an upscale, (not cheap) look. Cars were styled so that the ww was an accent. Even Corvettes came with them! In the 90’s, following the imports coming over with only blackwalls, styling changed, to where a Cadillac would look good wearing them. Blackwall tires on 50’s to late 70’s cars tended (IMO) to make them look pitiful. I never had a car with blackwalls, until I bought a Honda Accord; howver, I still have them on my other vehicles! A thin white stripe with mag wheels was my signature look. Anyone here remember the controversy caused when BMW came out with a wheel on its’ 7 series that look like a white wall?? 🙂
Whire wall tires were more expensive that black, and thus, they were often standard equipment on luxury cars, or for people who wanted an upscale, (not cheap) look. Cars were styled so that the ww was an accent. Even Corvettes came with them! In the 90’s, following the imports coming over with only blackwalls, styling changed, to where a Cadillac would look good wearing them. Blackwall tires on 50’s to late 70’s cars tended (IMO) to make them look pitiful. I never had a car with blackwalls, until I bought a Honda Accord; however, I still have them on my other vehicles! I guess I now fall into the camp that likes them both! A thin white stripe with mag wheels was my signature look. Anyone here remember the controversy caused when BMW came out with a wheel on its’ 7 series that looked like a white wall?? 🙂
Adding my car ownership experiences my first two cars (a 1976 Coupe de Ville and a 1981 Eldorado) had whitewall tires. After that everything else had blackwall tires, save for one time I bought a set of cheap whitewall tires for a Hyundai Excel and had the whitewalls mounted backwards so they’d point towards the inside of the car and the blackwalls were visible.
Thanks Tom, looking forward to more.
Only car I’ve ever had with WW tyres was my Skylark. When I replaced the tyres, I couldn’t get WW in the desired size.
I miss them.
For the most part I miss white wall tires, as they can make an ordinary car look extra ordinary. My daily driver for the past 25 years has been a mildly factory look custom 1986 GMC square body that I call a “Cameo II”. I can’t drive it any where without people giving me the thumbs up and positive comments. I have thought about it and think that the reason is not so much with the look of the truck itself, but having to do with two factors.
The first is that my truck has a two tone paint scheme, with complimentary colors.
The second is that it has wider white wall tires (factory correct 1 3/8″ – as shown in the new truck brochure for 1986).
Two things almost never seen for the past 25 yrs or more.
I sort of think that the cars that started the change away from white wall tires were the mid 1970s Mercedes Benz’s. I had a 1975 450 SEL, and it looked so good and different and sort of spoke to German Engineering to me for some reason. It was around this time that the black wall tire started to be seen on American cars – trying to look European. Eventually, the black wall tire took over completely.
The car, in my opinion, that started the black wall trend in the 1970s – the Mercedes Benz 450 SEL, as well as other models in the Mercedes Benz lineup.
A great and informative write-up. The first picture is a contradiction, Allstate Safety Tread – but there are serious cracks that tell me the tread would separate from the carcass soon. No safety there anymore.
In the 1920s my grandparents, who lived in southwestern Ontario, bought a summer cottage on Lake Huron. It was about 70 miles away and was an all day drive. According to my mother the question was always “how many flats did you get?”. For at least part of the time they drove a 1925 Ford. I don’t know what they had before that. Now the drive takes an hour.
Just so Mike ;
My father once told me of a road trip taken in the late 1930’s in a 1931 Buick, by the time they returned they’d lost count of the flats and had bought new tires which also needed flats fixed .
Early Three Stooges films have at least two that cover this in detail .
-Nate