HISTORY OF TIRES

The story of the wheel is the history of modern civilization. 3500 B.C.E. is the approximate date early man discovered the beautifully simple potential of the circle. Since that time, heels have been made of stone, wood, steel, aluminium, carbon fiber and many other materials. It wasnt, however, until the 19th century A.D. that a suitable soft wrap could be invented for those hard wheels. Two men did more to put the world on rubber tires than anyone else; Charles Goodyear, an obsessed inventor; and John Boyd Dunlop, a part time tinkerer. GOODYEAR Charles Goodyear was tenacious about pursuing his ideas to the point of bankrupting himself and his family and ruining his health. Goodyear was the vanguard of a movement whose followers were convinced that miraculous properties of natural rubber had not yet been fully realized in the early 1800s. Goodyear would be in and out of debtors prison all his life and eventually die owing credits $200,000. To understand how the invention of one man led to the staggering fortunes of those who followed, it is necessary to understand that for a period in the 1830s rubber companies had as much investor interest and financial potential as the Internet craze of the 1990s. Besides that, Goodyear was attempting to sell the manager of a Roxbury India Rubber Co. retail store in New York on a valve he had invented for rubber life preserves when he discovered the companys entire stock had become a stinking pile of gum due to the heat. During one of his many jail sentence for debt, he kneading and studying his miracle gum for his pass time. Once out of jail, he experimented with adding a tale-like magnesia powder to the raw rubber to remove its tackiness and was pleased with the result. The next stage of his success was the idea of mixing magnesia and quicklime with rubber and boing the mixture. One fateful day he ran out of raw rubber and used nitric acid to remove the bronze paint from one of his crafts so as to use it in an experiment. His new nitric acid process looked to be money in the bank. The rest of Goodyears life was spent further developing his rubber recipe and finding myriad new uses for the compound. Unfortunately for his familys financial situation, his focus on invention prevented him from making sound business decisions and he died with only his name to his credit in 1860. He and his family were in noway involved with the company that would be founded four decades later bearing the Goodyear name. That company would become one of the worlds largest corporations and eventually rake in billions of dollars. DUNLOP John Boyd Dunlop was a successful veterinarian with a practise in Belfast, Ireland, when he stepped onto the rubber road of fortune that had eluded Charles Goodyear. One day in 1888 Dunlop was watching his son struggle with his bicycle because its solid rubber tires. The vet realise that compressed air would make the rubber tire more pliable over odd-shaped surfaces

and more comfortable for his son. He covered a rubber inner tube with a jacket of linen tape and scaled it all with an outer rubber tread. Dunlop wasnt the first person to put together such a device. Robert William Thomson had patented a tubeless tire design in 1846 but Dunlop improved on the idea and made it practical for production. Realising he was sitting on a gold mine, Dunlop quickly went into business producing tires. In 1896, he sold his patent and interest in the company for 3 million pounds. Within 10 years of its patent, the pneumatic tire replaced solid rubber tires in almost all applications. The Dunlop company was eventually acquired, ironically enough, by Goodyear Tire and Rubber. Goodyear and Dunlop, the men, did more to put the world on soft rubber tires than anyone else in history. Although there have been great strides in tire technology since, it was these two pioneers - very much unalike in method and personality - whose lives and work most impacted the way we live today. HOW MODERN RADIAL TIRES ARE MADE Ingredients for a radial tire include more than 30 different types of rubber, cord and wire and big helpings of pigments and chemicals. Different manufacturers have different recipe and systems for creating a tire. What follows is a generalized step by step of the tire-building process. Banbury machines think giant kitchen blenders that can mix under tremendous heat and pressure. From the Banbury, these bands will be processed into six main components that will eventually make up the bulk of a tires casing. 1. A tuber shapes the flat strips into tread rubber, which is measured, cooled and cut to precise lengths. 2. Another tuber converts the strips into sidewalls, which can be combined at this stage with white rubber for a whitewall or white lettering. 3. A calendar mill creates the plies by combining thin sheets of rubber with rayon, nyln or polyester fibers. 4. Belts are created when steel from a specialised creel room is mated to rubber from the processing mills to create wide, flat sheets that are cut to size and moved to the tire-making machine. 5. The innerliner is a sort of built in inner tube that begins as a double layer of synthetic gum rubber. 6. The bead is formed on a high-tensile steel backbone, which will eventually fit against the wheels rim.