MOTORING: When will some brain uninvent the puncture?

We all know what a tyre is.  But how did a black rubber thing full of air, wrapped around wheel rims, get its name? Strange but true it comes from the word “attire” (clothing) because it “dressed” an otherwise bare wooden or iron wheel. 

Rubber missed the christening for the reason that the first  “tyres were made of leather -  stitched into a loop and soaked so they could be stretched tightly over the wooden wheel rim. The main job of these “clothes” was  to reduce wear  to the wheel.

In a quest about 200 years ago  to add better comfort and grip, solid rubber hoops were fitted into a “clincher” around the outer edge of a wheel.   This material stayed the same shape and size in wet or dry weather,  and offered a little more cushion and tractio.  The idea of making the tyre casing hollow, and filling it with a balloon of air, was patented exactly 170 years ago by  Scottish boffin Robert Thomson, but it took 40 years before a vet in Ireland (John Dunlop) produced an air-filled (pneumatic) tyre, with much better comfort, grip and wear life…for his son’s tricycle.

And we’ve never looked back.  Or much forward. The rubber has progressed from simple vulcanisation to synthetic mixtures with far superior strength, versatility and  performance characteristics (since 1920); the integrity of the tyre casing has changed from cross ply to radial ply (since 1946); the range of reinforcing materials embedded in the rubber has widened from simple cord to include nylon, rayon, steel and more recently Kevlar; we’ve progressively used the tyre itself  instead of an inner tube to hold the air and throughout we’ve hugely proliferated  sizes, widths,  tread patterns and rims.   But tyres in 2017 are still fundamentally what they were in 1887.  And they still get punctures!

Technology has designed run-flat tyres so they still work even when they’ve got a puncture, we’ve invented all manner of post-puncture gunk to re-inflate flat tyres and seal some leaks, and the tubeless tyre has made the most common types of puncture (nails and thorns) usually very much easier to fix.  But punctures remain the single most common and universal “breakdowns” in world motoring.

Is there really no thick-skinned spongy material that will do all a tyre has to do, with just the right behavioural and wear characteristics,  that either does not contain any air or which stops the air it does contain from escaping? There are three possible answers:  1.  No their isn’t.  2.  Yes there is, but it is commercially inconvenient. 3.  Yes there is, but we haven’t found it yet. I leave it to your imagination to decide which of those options is most likely; and if and when the clothes wheels wear will ever truly change.