Oldham Tyres

 
We realise we’re at severe risk of being accused of bias – but here at Oldham Tyres, we believe the importance of the car tyre is often overlooked.

 
Whatever speed or conditions you drive in, you wouldn’t be going anywhere – or stopping whenever you want either – without the four “postcard sized” patches of rubber in contact with the road.

 
So in homage to our favourite component of your motor vehicle… we’d like to take you back over a brief history of the tyre…

 
Have you ever wondered where we would be if it wasn’t for the humble car tyre?

 
You’d either be walking, or stuck in a “Hansom Cab” traffic jam on the M62! The truth is the car may never have made it into the twentieth century – if it hadn’t been for advances in the car tyre.

 
In this, and the next blog-post, we’re going to have a brief look at some of the key developments in the car tyre – and see how it’s gone from a “wild west-style bone shaker” to something that lets thrill seeking speed junkies break the land speed record.

 
Have you seen the old cowboy movies – where the wagon train pulls out of New York and heads off to the promised land of California? Well, most of the early “cars” were little more than wagons with motors – or ‘horseless carriages’ – and they were still using wooden wheels.

 
The first evolution was to replace the wood with steel. Carriages progressed to having steel on the outside of the wooden wheels to hold the segments together, and it’s believed that this steel ‘tie’ is where the name ‘tire’ has its origins.

 
We can trace the first real development of the car tyre as we know it today – back to 1736 – 30 years before the first ever “self-propelled road vehicle” appeared. It was then that Frenchman Charles Marie de La Condamine invented rubber – from samples he’d taken from the Para-Rubber tree of South America.

 
The next piece in the puzzle was Charles Goodyear‘s discovery of the process of vulcanization (1839). But, it was later revealed that the Mesoamericans had used a stabilized rubber way back in 1600 BC. – a mere 3450 years before Goodyear invented it!

 
Goodyear was the first of many key figures in the development of the tyre – whose brand is still available at Oldham Tyres today!

 
So, in the beginning there was the wheel – but it took two Scotsmen to really get it rolling.

 
And this is where we will pick up from, in Part 2 in a couple of days time…