In the 1920s the Texas Panhandle started burning natural gas on purpose to make soot, and that soot is the reason American tires stopped wearing out in five thousand miles.
When the Panhandle field came in, it produced staggering volumes of natural gas and there was no pipeline to carry it anywhere people needed heat. Gas with no market was worth nothing. So companies built long low sheds with hundreds of small burners inside, ran the gas to them, let the flames lick cast iron channels, and scraped off the lampblack that collected there. That lampblack is carbon black, and when it is worked into rubber it makes the rubber far tougher than it has any right to be.
Tire makers in Ohio could not get enough of it. Plants spread across Hutchinson, Gray and Carson counties, and for decades a large share of the nation's carbon black came off the Texas plains. Every man who worked one went home black from the eyebrows down and never fully got it out of his skin. Tread life went from a few thousand miles to tens of thousands, and ordinary families could suddenly afford to drive hard without buying tires every season.
America learned to drive long distances on soot scraped out of a shed in the Panhandle.
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