Pneumatic Tire

A pneumatic tire is a ring-shaped, air-filled component fitted around a wheel's rim to carry a vehicle's load from the axle to the ground and to provide traction, replacing the metal bands fitted to wooden wheels that came before it; modern tires are built from natural and synthetic rubber, fabric, wire, and carbon black around a tread that grips the road. John Boyd Dunlop, working in Belfast, built the first practical pneumatic tire in 1888 to smooth his young son's ride on a tricycle over rough pavement, though Robert William Thomson had patented the underlying pneumatic-tire concept in 1847 without developing it commercially; Dunlop's contribution was recognizing that rubber could withstand a tire's wear while keeping its resilience, and the cyclist Willie Hume demonstrated the design's advantage by winning races on it in Ireland and England in 1889. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/