Having gotten lost in a dense wood one summer evening, I stumbled upon a campsite with three men sitting around a fire. They were none other than Henry Ford, Harvey Samuel Firestone, and Thomas Alva Edison. They invited me to join them as they talked and sipped their coffee.
“Do you remember back in the 1890s, Henry, when you were using bicycle tires for your early-model automobiles?” Firestone asked.
“Of course,” Ford replied, “and then in ’03, you and I met, and you said you had just gotten a pneumatic inner tube tire that was better than a solid rubber tire. I needed a cushioned tire to soften the ride. I had built up the weight of my automobiles to 500 pounds and that was far too much for bicycle wheels.”
Firestone recalled: “I eventually had to lease a million acres in Liberia to supply the rubber for my tire production. In 1906, I delivered 2000 sets of pneumatic tires from my Akron plant to you, Henry.”