John Dunlop

Transport museums usually display a range of old bicycles including one nicknamed “the bone rattler”. When cobblestones were common, and when tyres were of solid rubber, such a nickname was well deserved. The smooth ride we get today is due to John Dunlop.

Born into a farming family in Ayrshire in Scotland, John Boyd Dunlop was a veterinary surgeon by profession, having qualified at Edinburgh University when he was only 19. He worked as a vet in Edinburgh for nearly ten years before moving to Belfast. He built up a large practice in Ireland but found the rough roads and the iron, wood or solid rubber wheels an uncomfortable way to travel.

He experimented with his son's tricycle and in 1887 he came up with a design based on an inflated rubber tube and patented it the following year. This was not the first time someone had tried this - another Scot, Robert William Thomson had patented the idea in 1845 (though Dunlop was unaware of this).

At the Queen’s College Sports in Belfast in 1889, a bicycle fitted with Dunlop’s pneumatic tyres won the cycle race, an event which heralded a revolution in road transport. He established what would become the Dunlop Rubber Company but had to fight and win a legal battle with Thomson. John Dunlop did not benefit much financially from his invention - he sold the patent and company name early on. Despite Thomson's earlier work, Dunlop is credited with the invention of the modern rubber tyre.
Dunlop retired to Dublin and died there in 1921.