A veterinary surgeon cuts up a hose

Anyone who has ridden a bicycle any great distance along a cobblestone street will be able to testify all too readily to the bone-jarring experience that can be. What it must have been like to pedal over the cobbles on a bike with solid wheels can only be winced at. One can certainly sympathise with a young boy valiantly attempting to negotiate the cobblestone streets of 19th-century Belfast on his tricycle.

Fortunately for the young boy – and for millions of cyclists (and then motorists) – his father did not just put an arm around his shoulders and tell him that the experience was character-building, but rather set about to remedy the situation. Since the cobblestones were clearly there to stay, it was the tricycle that needed to be redesigned – or more precisely, its tyres. The boy’s father was not an engineer or an inventor but, undaunted, he set to work to find a way of making his son’s tricycling less harrowing.

John Dunlop, the father in question, was born on a farm in Dreghorn, Ayrshire, in 1840. Having grown up around animals he became a veterinary surgeon, practising in Edinburgh. He moved to Downpatrick, Ireland, in 1867 and four years later married Margaret Stevenson, with whom he had a daughter and a son. Moving to Belfast, Dunlop built up one of the most successful veterinary practices in the country.

But for one incident in 1887 he would surely have carried on with this perfectly agreeable life and, after his death, his name would have been remembered by no one but grateful animal-owners.

The stories surrounding that event vary but Dunlop either saw his son struggling over the cobblestones or his son asked him if he could do something that would make his ride more comfortable. Either way, he took his boy’s tricycle and started experimenting.

His breakthrough came when he cut a length from an old garden hose, looped it around to form a continuous tube, pumped it up and fitted it around a wooden disc. He tested his new creation by rolling it across his yard. He then removed a wheel from his son’s tricycle and rolled that across the garden too. He found that the disc with the loop of hose on it went considerably further than the solid wheel. Excited by this turn of events, he fitted tubes to the rear wheels of the tricycle. The effect was immediate and dramatic – the ride over the cobblestones was suddenly a lot less bone-shaking than it had been. John Dunlop had invented the pneumatic tyre. By December 1888 his design had been granted a patent.

Unbeknownst to him, he was not the first person to invent a pneumatic tyre. Just over 40 years beforehand, a fellow Scot called Robert Thompson had patented just such an invention and had registered it in France and the United States. However, the idea had not caught on and Thompson’s design had languished in the files of the respective patent offices.

The difference now was that Dunlop’s tyre had a sporting champion. Willie Hume, the captain of the Belfast Cruisers Cycling Club, was the first person ever to buy a bicycle with pneumatic tyres. He promptly won all four races at a Queen’s College cycling gala in May 1889 with his newfangled tyres, and followed that up with further successes in Liverpool. The president of the Irish Cyclists’ Association, Harvey Du Cros, approached Dunlop with the idea of setting up a company to manufacture the tyres, and soon cyclists were taking to them in droves. The pneumatic tyre quickly became a standard feature on all bicycles and the day of the solid wheel was over. The new tyre meant that much greater distances could be travelled in comfort. Cycling boomed.

It’s worth noting that the success of Dunlop’s tyre was due in no small part to its use of vulcanised rubber. This, too, had come about rather by chance. Back in 1839, in a Massachusetts workshop, Charles Goodyear was experimenting with a mixture of rubber, sulphur and white lead in a bid to create a rubber that would not go brittle in the cold or sticky in the heat. He left his mixture painted onto a patch of fabric and when he returned he discovered that someone had, for reasons unknown, placed it on top of a hot stove. Goodyear noticed that the heat had not made the rubber runny. Before long he had perfected the heating process and vulcanised rubber was born.

The business set up by Dunlop and Du Cros – which they named The Pneumatic Tyre and Booth’s Cycle Agency – went from strength to strength, even overcoming the setback of losing the patent rights to the pneumatic tyre on account of Robert Thompson’s prior claim. Dunlop did not remain long with the company, and a year later, in 1896, Du Cros sold it to British financier Terah Hooley for £3 million. In the early 20th century, the company was renamed Dunlop Rubber.

By coincidence, Karl Benz produced the world’s first motorcar just two years before Dunlop put in for his patent on the pneumatic tyre. A decade or so after the Scotsman’s invention had become de rigueur for bicycles, a thicker, more durable pneumatic tyre was developed and soon all new cars were provided with them.

Dunlop died in 1921 at the age of 81. He never made a great deal of money from his invention, but his fatherly concern over his son’s discomfort resulted in the revolutionising of not just the bicycle but the motorcar as well.