#innovator

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Piles of the Yinnovator’s spores

October 23rd 1921 saw the death of John Boyd Dunlop who re-invented the pneumatic tyre from the design of fellow Scot, Robert W Thomson.

There are, of course, mainly Americans who think that Charles Goodyear invented tyres – he didn’t, but he did invent and patent the process of vulcanisation which made solid rubber tyres and many other rubber products more viable.

Dunlop was a Scottish vet living in Belfast, he had carried out several scientific experiments with rubber, especially rubber tubing for veterinary usages, but it was a problem with his nine-year-old son Johnny’s tricycle that led Dunlop to his great breakthrough.

Wee Johnny Dunlop complained that when he rode his bicycle to school the cobbled streets made his bottom sore. Dunlop solved his son’s problem by “inventing” a pneumatic tyre, but then it became clear that this tyre was faster - the lad kept winning cycle races.

There was a famous cycle race on the Queen’s College playing fields on 18th May 1889 and Dunlop persuaded the cycle champion Willie Hume to use the new tyres. Willie won the race and everybody wanted the tyres, and so the Dunlop Rubber Company was formed.

What Dunlop did not realise was that 43 years earlier another Scot had patented almost the same thing. Robert Thomson was given a workshop by his father where he invented all sorts of things. In 1845 Thomson patented what he called aerial wheels. There were no bicycles then, so it would not have been a bicycle tyre that he invented.

There were no internal combustion engines either, just a few steam carriages, and otherwise horse-drawn carriages and carts. However, Thomson did some elegant experiments. He fitted his tyres to a carriage and, in Regent’s Park in London, had it pulled side by side with an ordinary carriage. He showed it was much easier to pull the one with pneumatic tyres.

All the watching journalists thought it would be slower because the tyres were soft. It was easier to pull and also silent - it did not make the noise of a carriage. The pneumatic tyres were a huge success but there was no market at the time - rubber was very expensive in the 1840s.

Dunlop’s patent was granted on 7th December 1888 though the existence of Thomson’s earlier patents in France and the USA meant he could not claim to have invented the idea – his process, however, was recognised in its own right and there soon came proof that Dunlop’s tyres were revolutionary, as the champion Irish cyclist Willie Hume won almost every race he entered. The days of solid bicycle tyres were numbered.