About John Boyd Dunlop
John Boyd Dunlop was a Scottish inventor and veterinary surgeon who spent most of his career in Ireland. Familiar with making rubber devices, he invented the practical pneumatic tyres for his child's tricycle and developed them for use in cycle racing. He sold his rights to the pneumatic tyres to a company he formed with the president of the Irish Cyclists' Association, Harvey du Cros, for a small cash sum and a small shareholding in their pneumatic tyre business. Dunlop withdrew in 1896. The company that bore his name, Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre Company, was not incorporated until later and, despite its name, was Du Cros's creation. John Boyd Dunlop has been commemorated with a blue plaque by the Ulster Historical Circle for inventing the first successful pneumatic tyre. Willie Hume demonstrated the supremacy of Dunlop's tyres in 1889, winning the tyre's first-ever races in Ireland and then England. The captain of the Belfast Cruisers Cycling Club, he became the first member of the public to purchase a bicycle fitted with pneumatic tyres, so Dunlop suggested he should use them in a race. On 18 May 1889 Hume won all four cycling events at the Queen's College Sports in Belfast, and a short while later in Liverpool, won all but one of the cycling events.
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