Pneumatic tyre

Scottish vet helps son to cycle faster

John Boyd Dunlop (Dreghorn, North Ayrshire, February 5, 1840 – Dublin, October 23, 1921)

There are very nice pictures of the old John Boyd Dunlop in 1920, when he is eighty years old. He sits upright on his bicycle, dressed in a stylish black suit. He wears a strangely flattened hat and his long white beard is parted in two halves by the wind.

This is how the Dubliners got to see the inventor of the pneumatic tire in those years. He had been wealthy twice in his life and was now poor again. He ran a small fabric store in town. His only son, for whom he had designed the pneumatic tire at the time, was long dead.

And he knew that many would make a fortune with his brand name. Knowing that, he died a few months later.

Dunlop was born in 1840 on a large farm in Scotland. Physically he was not up to the hard work and his parents sent him to the University of Edinburgh to study veterinary medicine.

At the age of 27 he moved to Belfast, Ireland, where he established himself as a veterinarian. In twenty years he built up a large practice. He was successful with all kinds of special medicines for animals, and at one point employed ten assistants.

The world was all right when in 1887 his ten-year-old son Johnnie - Dunlop was 47 at the time - started to complain that he couldn't beat his bigger friends on his big tricycle bike.

Tires at that time were still made of solid rubber. John senior thought that inflatable, springy tires might allow greater speed. He bought a piece of thin rubber, made it into a kind of garden hose and attached it around a wooden disc.

He fitted the hose with a small supply tube and with his son's football pump he blew the thing full of air.

He tested the two wheels with an assistant. Which wheel would be faster, the one with the solid tire or the one with the pneumatic tire? "The full wheel, of course," said the assistant.

Dunlop writes in his memoirs: 'With a strong swing I rolled the wheel with the solid rubber tire through the garden, but it didn't come as far as the rear. Then I did the same with my disk around which the hose was attached.

It rolled the length of the garden to the closed gate at the back, then bounced back some distance. My assistant thought I gave that checker a stronger push. Then tried
he himself agrees, with the same result.'

On February 28, 1888, more than 120 years ago, at ten o'clock in the evening, the first bicycle with pneumatic tires, albeit a large tricycle, was completely ready. Although it was late, little Johnnie was allowed a test drive. His bike had never had such momentum.

The president of the local cycling club wanted to try the tires and won one race after another. The spectators couldn't believe what they saw, they thought there was a devil in the wheels.

A wealthy businessman took the tires to heart, founded a firm with Dunlop and another lender – the Dunlop Rubber Company – and wore the tires all over Western Europe. The success was immense. Funnily enough, Dunlop started to be difficult.

The company was forced to buy patents for all kinds of improvements, a better valve or a tire that was easier to replace. But the inventor and co-owner took this as a personal insult and felt that his own improvements received too little attention.

In an angry mood, he sold all his shares in early 1895 and resigned. As the fledgling Dunlop Rubber Company grew into a multibillion-dollar global enterprise, the old seigneur grunted into a fabric store he had bought in Dublin.

The company did retain the right to use his majestic head with a long beard as a logo. But in 1920 they also quarreled about this, so that Dunlop filed a lawsuit against his former company. A year later he passed away.

The new tire of the obstinate Scottish vet nevertheless caused a revolution in traffic: thanks to Dunlop, cycling became easier, and women now also jumped on the bike. Cycling became fashion. And the automobile would never have made such rapid progress without the pneumatic tire.