Believing that most tire punctures are caused by old nails, Greensburg, Kansas, offers ten cents per pound for all old nails picked up on its streets. Small boys have already earned two hundred dollars in this way. The city then sells the nails as junk.

Giant magnets seven feet long are to be hung under State highway trucks in South Dakota to pick up bits of metal that might puncture automobile tires. In a test run of twenty miles one of these magnets picked up over three hundred pounds of steel and iron scraps. The collection included a stove leg, 24 railroad spikes, an old skate, a monkey wrench, pieces of barbed wire, and a thousand or so nails and tacks.

Source: The Outlook, 20 July 1927