96

John Boyd Dunlop

1840–1921

 

It is often remarkable from what small beginnings giant industries derive.  On the moonlit night of 28th February 1888, in a Belfast street, a small boy named Johnny Dunlop was to be seen riding his tricycle, under the supervision of his father.  The two rear wheels of the tricycle were the world's first pneumatic tyres and the boy was testing them for comfort over the rough cobblestones.

      The test was so successful that the boy's father, J.B. Dunlop, duly applied later that year for a patent.  Petitioned for on 23rd July 1888, patent no. 10607 was a provisional specification for 'a hollow tyre or tube made of India-rubber and cloth, or other suitable material, said tube or type to contain air under pressure or otherwise and to be attached to the wheel or wheels in such a method as may be found most suitable'.  It was dated 20th July 1888, and signed John Boyd Dunlop.  This is still, more or less, the specification of a tyre, but it initiated a revolution in the fields of industry and transport.

      John Boyd Dunlop was a veterinary surgeon, then living at 50 Gloucester Street, Belfast.  But he was not Irish, but Scottish by origins.  Though Ireland was his adopted country, he donated one of those first tyres to the Royal Scottish Museum, where it is still displayed.

      He was born at Dreghorn in Ayrshire.  At school he was a bright child, teaching maths to smaller children for small sums from the master.  He went on to Irvine Academy.  Qualifying as a vet, Dunlop went to live in Belfast in 1867, then at the start of its rapid industrial development.  Soon he had created what he said to be the largest animal medicine practice in the country.

      It was here he made his invention - or rather reinvention, for an earlier patent had been taken out on the basic principle by a Scottish inventor Robert William Thomson (1822-73) in 1846, which led to Dunlop's first patent being refused.  He began work on the idea in October 1887, the first tests being made in February 1888.  His 'sausages', as the new tyres were nicknamed, enabled a rider named Hume to win every race which he entered at the Queen's College sports in the summer of 1888.  'There is a demon in that machine', a bystander commented.  Edlin & Sinclair, a firm in Belfast, began to make Dunlop's 'safety tyres', the first advertisements for which appeared in March 1889.

      Next, in partnership with Harvey Du Cros, the Pneumatic Tyre Company was founded in Dublin in 1889, also taking over Booths Cycle Agency Ltd.  It was capitalized at £24,000, and the prospectus claimed that the new safety tyre was: 'indispensable for ladies and persons with delicate nerves'. 

      But a large part of this capital went on the Booth interest, and Dunlop was unhappy with the way in which the business was developing.  Like many inventors he was more at home in the workshop than in the boardroom or the back office.  He sold out his interest to Harvey du Cros, the president of the Irish Cyclists Association, in 1889, and it was Du Cros and his third son Arthur who actually developed the business as managing directors.  Dunlop went to live in Dublin in March 1892, where he was appointed chairman of Todd Burns, a large drapery and department store in the city centre.

      He retired from the board of Dunlop in 1895, and his last association with the business was in 1909 when he was guest of honour at a dinner given by the cycle and motor trade and related clubs.  Later he and his daughter boasted that they held no shares in the huge industrial concern that carried his name.  He also invented a carburettor, which had some small vogue, but his name would be forever linked with his tyre.  He had made investments in Australia and it was the success of these that provided most of his income when he died, on 23rd October 1921.

      The advent of the pneumatic rubber tyre heralded a social revolution.  Rubber had been known since the discovery of America, but it was only with the introduction of vulcanisation in 1844 that it became widely usable in industry.  What was used came largely from Brazil, where it was tapped from wild trees in the jungle.  This work was done largely by Indians and imported workers, who were ruthlessly exploited, which led to a scandal investigated by ROGER CASEMENT [94], on the River Putumayo.  Casement's revelations accelerated the shift of the rubber industry from South America to the Far East which had already begun some time earlier.  In June 1876 some 70,000 seeds were brought out from Brazil to Britain where they were reared at Kew Gardens; some 2,700 germinated, resulting in 1,919 plants being shipped to Ceylon.  In Brazil, rubber had been harvested from wild trees, in Asia it was to be cultivated in plantations.  By 1899 only four tons of rubber was produced in the Far East, but by 1922 these plantations were producing 95 per cent of the world's rubber, by 1932 it was 98 per cent.  An economic revolution had taken place, which advanced the British Empire and reduced Brazil.

      This rapid expansion was largely the result of the introduction of the pneumatic tyre.  It started a rage for cycling in the 1890s which altered life for the lower-middle and working classes.  Enthusiasts included H.G. Wells, who was not the only writer to pen 'cycling novels'.  With this freedom went a certain amount of sexual liberation; the new girl was a girl on a bicycle.

      The motorcar fitted with pneumatic tyres was also liberated by the abolition in 1896 of the Red Flag Act, which had restricted them to 4mph behind a man with a red flag.  Motoring, for the upper-middle classes and the rich, became the rage.  The consequences of the motorcar are something the world is still adjusting to, with many now hoping for a return to the city trams and buses of the 1880s!

      By the turn of the century Dunlop tyres were being made in France, Germany, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, and a little later in Japan.  In 1902 a reorganized company, now the Dunlop Rubber Company, removed to Coventry, then the heart of the bicycle industry and the fledgling car industry.  At first the Dunlop company concentrated on making cycle tyres, but soon widened its ambitions to making car tyres, sports equipment and other rubber goods.  The company continued to grow and in 1908 began to make the rims and wheels too.  In 1916 the Dunlop Cotton Mills were set up, so that the firm now controlled all the basis materials it needed.

      In 1910 Dunlops acquired its first rubber plantation in Malaya.  By now the rubber plants exported to the Far East had been developed into an industry, especially in Malaya, where British imperial interest was expanding from Singapore into controlling the Malay native states on the mainland.

      Here in specially planted rubber estates the rubber was harvested as a regular business - rubber (along with tin) remains an essential part of the economy of modern Malaysia.  It was the need for rubber that brought about the Japanese invasion of Malaya in 1940, and the rubber plantations were the object of communist terrorists and the foundations of modern Malaysian wealth.  Elsewhere companies such as Goodyear and Firestone were involved in the political developments of such American quasi-colonies as Liberia and Guatemala.  Rubber for tyres became and still remains an economic motivator all over the world.

      Back in Britain, meanwhile, in 1916 the great tyre factory at Fort Dunlop was opened.  Here the production of the company would be based for a long time to come.  In 1917, the company was capitalized at £6 million, in 1919 at £7.5 million, and in 1920, the year before Dunlop died, at £10 million.  By now the motor industry in the Midlands, in America, and elsewhere had come of age.  Dunlop's tyres were what the twentieth century ran on.  Victory over the Americans in Vietnam, for instance, was achieved by the Viet Cong using bicycles which they would ride almost unobserved through the jungle.  It was a remarkable achievement for a company that began with the tests on little Johnny's trike that dark evening in 1888.