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pany Sports Direct. This is a story about a brand name, the problem of true and untrue bounce, and current conditions of global industrial pro- duction. Taken together, these Dunlop stories describe the everyday con- struction of patriarchy and empire. I call these stories following this understanding of storytelling as a form of thinking-with that enables a making-otherwise. In this, I am following Donna Haraway who writes,
“Each time a story helps me remember what I thought I knew, or intro- duces me to new knowledge, a muscle critical for caring about flourishing gets some aerobic exercise” (Haraway 2016, p. 29). These stories are dense and take work to unwind. In exploring the overlaps of how sport has shaped the history of rubber, how rubber has shaped the history of sport, and how together they have shaped the histories of Dunlop, it becomes possible to say: sport runs the histories of Dunlop.
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rider or racer of wheeled vehicles, mechanical or motorized, the story of the pneumatic tire has something to do with you.
Dunlop was not the first person, not even the first Scottish man, to make an inflated tire out of rubber. But the aerial wheels that Robert William Thompson had patented in 1845 failed to become established commodities. Thompson’s wheels went the way of so many new tech- nologies that are invented and then for any number of reasons forgotten, passed by, surpassed, or suppressed. They were only recalled to public attention in order to break the monopoly of Dunlop’s 1888 patent for the air tire (Du Cros 1938, p. 102). In that patent, Dunlop identified “immu- nity from vibration” and “increased speed of travel” as the two ways in which his tire would improve the movement of “wheeled vehicles” over
“roadways and paths, especially when these latter are of rough and uneven character” (Patent Specification No. 10,607 1888, p. 2). The patent sin- gles out velocipedes (the name for early forms of bicycles), invalid chairs, and ambulances whose riders have a special interest in smoother and faster rides (Ibid).
Many accounts of Dunlop’s invention tell it as a story of a father and son: in Belfast, in 1887, John Boyd Dunlop Sr. invented an air tire for his young son, John Boyd Dunlop Jr. (who was known as Johnnie), prompted by the boy’s complaints of jarring rides across Belfast’s cobblestoned streets on his tricycle. The father and son story is a common trope. And like most tropes, it hides as much as it reveals. There is no evidence that the invention was prompted by the boy’s complaints. But Johnnie did take the first test ride on a tricycle outfitted with two air tires on the night of February 28, 1888 (Dunlop 1925, p. 15; Bijker 1997, p. 79). And after the first successful test, Dunlop recalls Johnnie repeatedly asking him to hurry up to make more tires so that he could use them to beat his bigger friends in their cycle races at the People’s Park in Belfast—the first of an escalating series of cycling races that would convince people of the value of these new pneumatic rubber objects. Dunlop’s own telling, com- pleted and published posthumously by his daughter, Jean McClintock, situates the moment of invention not as a sudden inspiration provoked by Johnnie’s tricycle rides but rather as the resolution of a lifelong interest in transportation and the problem of antivibration. Dunlop dates his
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interest in the shock of crossing uneven ground back to his early days as a child in Dreghorn, Ayrshire, where the Dunlop clan tended great swaths of land as tenant farmers, writing, “[a]s long as I can remember I have taken an interest in locomotion by road, rail, and sea” (Dunlop 1925, p. 10). In Belfast, Dunlop employed 16 horse-shoers in his veterinary practice, which was one of the largest in Ireland at the time (Cooke 2000, p. 6), and it is easy to imagine that his childhood interest in antivibration would have been animated and amplified by regularly tending to animals who were experiencing the full impact of the road.
Like many inventions, the air tire reflects the materials, objects, peo- ple, and practices of work and play that were immediately at hand. One of the most important of these was rubber. By 1887, the process of vulcanization had been in use for 40 years and rubber was being used in a wide range of contexts. Dunlop attributes his turn to rubber in part to his “experience in making rubber appliances which I had invented in connection with my veterinary work” (Dunlop 1925, p. 15). For the pneumatic component, he drew inspiration from a common play object, a football, borrowing his son’s football pump to inflate the tire’s rubber tube through a supply tube and tying “the little air supply tube in the same manner as one would tie a football” (Dunlop 1925, p. 13).
He would also have been familiar with rubber from the solid rubber tires that were used on the carriages drawn by the horses he treated and on tricycles like Johnnie’s. Cycling drove the story of the air tire. The nineteenth century had seen the rise of both road and track races in Northern Europe and North America (Tenner 2003, p. 80). With the advent of the cycling craze in the 1860s, production of bicycles, tricy- cles, and other velocipedes surged and clubs and organizations and newly minted cycling companies sponsored races to encourage the pur- chase of the vehicles and adoption of the practice. Although some women competed, and cycling would eventually play an important role in increasing women’s mobility (Bijker 1997), most of the racers at the time were men.
On May 18, 1889, Willie Hume, captain of the Cruisers’ Cycle Club, ran away with every event at the Belfast Queen’s College Sporting Games on a racer fitted with Dunlop tires made by Edlin and Sinclair, bicycle
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makers who had partnered with Dunlop after witnessing an early test.
Willie Hume was not known as an outstanding cyclist, so on that day in May people took note of his wins. Harvey Du Cros, a Dublin born busi- nessman of French Hugenot descent and president of the Irish Cycling Association, paid special attention. Hume had beaten two of Du Cros’ six sons in those races. Du Cros’ sons were top cyclists and their father, a former competitive athlete himself, took winning, and losing, seriously.
Du Cros was not the first person to approach Dunlop about creating a company, but he was the one who ended up purchasing Dunlop’s patents and orchestrating the incorporation of the Pneumatic Tyre and Booths Cycle Agency in November of 1889. As the company grew, cycling races continued to do the work of creating desire and demand for the new tire, first across Ireland and then in England where the “Irish Brigade” won all of the championships (Cooke 2000, p. 15). While Dunlop himself may have been fascinated with antivibration, what sold the air tire was the pursuit of speed (Bijker 1997, p. 84). The race track was where speed was put on display and this allowed the new tire to make its mark.
The cycling races that served as a testing ground for this new pneu- matic technology were one endpoint for a global supply chain. In the company’s early days, before it purchased its own rubber mills, Dunlop personally ordered the rubber sheets and tubes from India rubber manu- facturers such as Thornton and Co. of Edinburgh, Bates of Leicester, and Silverton and Co. (officially the India Rubber, Gutta Percha, and Telegraph Works Company) (Dunlop 1925, p. 31). In the 1890s, the companies that Dunlop was purchasing from would have still relied on “wild” rub- ber, collected from trees and vines scattered throughout forests by people who had been indentured, enslaved, or otherwise coerced into the work in Brazil (an independent nation under the control of a military dictator- ship led by Deodoro da Fonseca) and the Congo Free State (a territory under the personal control of King Leopold II of Belgium). But the plan- tations in India, Ceylon, and Malaya were on the horizon and the coming transformation in the model of production promised to undercut the existing models of extraction in South America and Africa. As a result, those at the sites of wild rubber extraction faced systems of savage oppres- sion and violence exacted under the cover of a discourse of efficiency and rationality (Hochschild 1998; Loadman 2005; Taussig 1980).
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As the rubber industry grew and the market boomed based in large part on the demand for tires, the sites of rubber extraction became areas of mass death. There are two well-known cases of torture and mass mur- der. The first occurred in the Congo Basin from 1885 to 1908 under Leopold II of Belgium. The second took place in the Putumayo region from 1879 to 1912 under the control of Julio César Arana, the Peruvian head of the British-registered Anglo-Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company.
These two sites of sustained murder became known to the broader British and American public in part through two reports written by Roger Casement, who was sent by the British Foreign Office to document, and report on each site. Others who played a significant role in witnessing, documenting, and writing about the massacres in Congo include Edmund Morel, Joseph Conrad, and George Washington Williams (Hochschild 1998). In King Leopold’s Ghost, Adam Hochschild describes how in Congo, when people failed to meet rubber quotas, Belgian “Force Publique soldiers or rubber company ‘sentries’ often killed everyone they could find” (Hochschild 1998, p. 226). Casement’s 1904 report details cases of Belgian soldiers cutting off and smoking hands and penises to send with the shipment of rubber as evidentiary explanation for why the load was light (Casement 1904). The best estimate of the number of people who died in the region due to murder, starvation or exhaustion, and disease during the period of rubber extraction alone is in the neigh- borhood of ten million, on par with the total number of causalities in World War I (Hochschild 1998). It is impossible to give an accurate number of deaths, let alone a complete list of names of those who died.
Dunlop’s name was attached to the tires from the start, beginning the transformation of the Scottish clan name into a global brand. By 1891, the company was making tires with treads that “left a trail of DUNLOP DUNLOP DUNLOP along the road, in the soft mud on wet days and in the dust on dry ones” (Tompkins 1981, p. 27). But it was not John Boyd Dunlop Sr. and Johnnie Dunlop but Harvey Du Cros and his sons who built and ran the global multinational that would carry the name and brandish the image of Dunlop. Despite Dunlop’s resignation from the board in 1895 due partly to tensions between him and Du Cros, the com- pany still used his name when it was floated on the stock exchange as the Dunlop Pneumatic Company in 1896. And decades later, Dunlop would
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sue the company over an advertisement that presented “a new John Boyd Dunlop, a tall, handsome, stylishly dressed old man, with a shiny hat and boots with spats, who had all the airs of an old bean. A cane and an eye- glass added to the splendour of the figure who recommended Dunlop wares to the world” (Cooke 2000, p. 28). In her forward to her father’s autobiography, Jean McClintock writes, “It was unfortunate that he con- sidered it necessary to sever all connection with the Company, which bears his name” (McClintock in Dunlop 1925, p. 5) and in her appendix adds:
I should here like to state clearly that my father has never at any time received money or compensation in any form from the Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre Co., either for the use of this name and bust or publication of the advertisement to which he objected … We all objected to the advertise- ment, not because it depicted a younger man than my father, but because it depicted a type, which is the antithesis of what my father really was.
(McClintock in Dunlop 1925, p. 95)
The story of the invention of Dunlop’s air tire is not, or not just, a story about a father and son and a set of cycling races. It is notable that Dunlop does not name his wife, Margaret Stevenson, or his daughter Jean in the text, while his son Johnnie is named and pictured as is Johnnie’s son, John Boyd. There is a story to be told about a daughter representing a father, and another about wives and mothers who are hard to catch sight of in the accounts the fathers and sons have written. And there is a story to be told about the millions of others who participated in collecting, transporting, and processing the rubber that went into these new pneumatic objects. The story of Dunlop is a story about carrying on, covering up, casting off, and handing over names.