"[The wheels are like] a cushion of air to the ground, rail, or track on which they run."
Robert William Thompson
Scottish-born engineer Robert William Thomson (c. 1822-1873) left school at age fourteen but within a couple of years he had managed to teach himself astronomy, chemistry, and the physics of electricity. By 'the time he was seventeen, he had his own workshop. Then at the tender age of twenty-three, he patented the "aerial wheel"—now known as the pneumatic tire. The tires consisted of a hollow belt of India rubber that could be inflated with "a cushion of air to the ground, rail or track on which they run." The idea was to provide people traveling over bumpy ground with a smoother ride.
Unfortunately for Thomson, in 1845 there were no cars to take advantage of the new tire; nor were there any bicycles. The only applications of his innovation were a few steam-powered carriages together with the traditional horse drawn carriages. Thomson, however, arranged for some journalists to watch him demonstrate the advantages of his cushioned wheel at Regent's Park in London. He had two carriages, one with old wheels and one fitted with pneumatic tires. Many of the observers had presumed that the pneumatic tires would make it harder to pull a carriage because the tires were soft. However, Thomson proved them wrong and he also showed that his tires produced a tiny fraction of the noise made by the traditional solid wheels. A set of his tires ran for 1,200 miles (1,931 km) without noticeable deterioration.
Sadly, Thomson's invention also coincided with a shortage in the thin rubber necessary for the inner tires. In time, the frustrated young inventor, who never became rich from his idea, turned his attention to the then more popular solid rubber tires. It was another fifty years before John Boyd Dunlop rediscovered the idea and built a global brand from it.
