John Boyd Dunlop

The pneumatic tyre. In Belfast in 1888 the vet Dunlop made air-filled tyres for his son's tricycle to soften the jolts of cobbled streets, and they proved faster as well as more comfortable. His patent was later ruled invalid because Robert William Thomson had patented the idea in the 1840s, but Dunlop's version arrived just as the safety bicycle did, and the company formed around it made air tyres standard on bicycles and then cars.