In 1887, a Scottish veterinarian named John Boyd Dunlop watched his son bounce painfully along a cobbled path on a tricycle and glued strips of rubber into a tube of air around the wheels that night, because the boy had complained of headaches from the ride — and the pneumatic tyre he improvised in his garden was working on Belfast streets within a year

Johnnie Dunlop was pedalling his tricycle across the granite setts of a Belfast yard when he told his father the ride was giving him headaches. The father was a veterinary surgeon from Dreghorn in ...