Historical Development

The first commercially successful pneumatic tire was developed in 1888 in Belfast by the Scottish veterinarian John Boyd Dunlop primarily to improve the riding comfort of bicycles. Dunlop also showed, albeit qualitatively, that his air-inflated "pneumatic" took less effort to rotate than did the solid rubber tires in use at that time. His qualitative tests were the first known rolling resistance experiments on pneumatic tires. Due to this significant reduction in rolling loss, many professional cyclists in Britain and Ireland adopted air-inflated tires for their bicycles by the early 1890s. Pneumatics for the nascent automobile industry soon followed.

Tires, like everything that rolls, encounter resistance. The resistance encountered by the tire rolling across a surface is a major factor in determining the amount of energy needed to move vehicles. Since Dunlop's original efforts, a considerable number of tire design improvements have been made that have tended to...