John Boyd Dunlop

John Boyd Dunlop (1840 to 1921) was a Scottish inventor who founded the rubber company that bears his name, the Dunlop Rubber Company and the Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre Company. Born on a farm at Dreghorn in North Ayrshire, he qualified as a veterinary surgeon in 1859 and moved to Belfast in 1867. In 1887 he developed the first practical pneumatic tyre for his son's tricycle and patented it in December 1888; the patent was later found to be invalid because Robert William Thomson had patented the idea in France in 1846 and in the United States in 1847. Commercial production began in Belfast in late 1890, and he assigned his patent to William Harvey Du Cros in return for shares in the resulting company. He died in Dublin in 1921.