Page:The Cycle Industry (1921).djvu/66

52 adulteration of cushion tyres, and although cycle makers of repute paid a fair price to obtain a good article, the makers of cheap shoddy bicycles often used cushion tyres that had very little india-rubber in their composition. The result can be easily imagined.

A tyre on the lines of a cushion tyre, because the air in the hollow part was not under compression, was Bartlett's original Clincher tyre. Bartlett was associated with the North British Rubber Co., Ltd., Edinburgh, big makers of rubber goods. They supplied the trade with quantities of solid and cushion tyres and he patented a tyre that fitted in clinches made by turning over the edges of a steel rim, so that if the tyre were moulded in a certain manner its edges would lock into the clinches and remain firm. The tyre was really just like a modern cover of a pneumatic tyre, but strengthened at the sides till it would support the weight of the rider and machine. The original Clincher tyre had no separate air tube, in fact no air tube at all; the air under it was at atmospheric pressure only.

Early Pneumatic Tyres. The introduction of the pneumatic tyre for bicycles came about in a strange manner known to most people, but repeated here for the benefit of the uninitiated.

In the suburbs of Dublin lived a veterinary surgeon named J. B. Dunlop; he was a cyclist and he had a rather delicate son. Naturally, he wanted the son to derive some benefit from riding a bicycle but he hesitated to allow him to ride a solid tyred bicycle owing to the vibration. The roads around Dublin are not of the best. Mr. Dunlop set to work, and like a lot of other inventors not connected with any particular manufacturing process, he thought out the very master idea that everybody had been looking for, that of insulating the rider at the point of contact of the wheel with the ground.