Robert William Thomson invents the pneumatic tire…

Robert William Thomson invents the pneumatic tire for horse-drawn carriages in 1845.

Thomson is twenty-three years old when he patents his pneumatic tire in Britain.

He is granted a patent in France in 1846 and in the US in 1847.

His tire consists of a hollow belt of India-rubber inflated with air so that the wheels present "a cushion of air to the ground, rail or track on which they run".

This elastic belt of rubberized canvas is enclosed within a strong outer casing of leather which is bolted to the wheel.

Thomson's "Aerial Wheels" are demonstrated in London's Regent's Park in March 1847 and are fitted to several horse-drawn carriages, greatly improving the comfort of travel and reducing noise.

One set will run for twelve hundred miles without sign of deterioration.

However, this never goes into production, and the first practical pneumatic tire will be made in 1888.

Born on June 29, 1822, in Stonehaven in the north east of Scotland, he had been baptized into the Church of Scotland on July 26, 1822.

Robert is the eleventh of twelve children of a local woolen mill owner.

His family had wished him to study for the ministry, but Robert refused, one reason being his inability to master Latin.

Robert had  left school at the age of fourteen and had gone to live with an uncle in Charleston, United States, where he was apprenticed to a merchant.

Two years later he returned home and taught himself chemistry, electricity and astronomy with the help of a local weaver who had a knowledge of mathematics.

Robert's father had given him a workshop, and by the time he was seventeen years old he had rebuilt his mother's washing mangle so that the wet linen could be passed through the rollers in either direction, had successfully designed and built a ribbon saw, and had completed the first working model of his elliptic rotary steam engine, which he will perfect in later life.

He had served an engineering apprenticeship in Aberdeen and Dundee before joining a civil engineering company in Glasgow.

He had then gone to work for an Edinburgh firm of civil engineers, where he devised a new method of detonating explosive charges by the use of electricity, thus greatly reducing the loss of lives in mines throughout the world.

Thomson had next worked as a railway engineer and supervised the blasting of chalk cliffs near Dover for the South Eastern Railway.

He had soon set up his own railway consultancy business and proposed the line for the Eastern Counties Railway, which was accepted by Parliament and eventually developed.