The puncture
Boo, hiss! Flat tyres have been a deflating experience since air-filled rubber first appeared in 1887
In half the country’s garages, a bike languishes with a puncture, awaiting car transport to a bike shop. We know this thanks to Cycling UK figures that reveal 47% of the population can’t fix a flat.
Punctures have dogged us since the invention of bike tyres in 1887. John Boyd Dunlop, a Scottish-born vet working in Ireland, devised an inflatable rubber tube for his kid’s trike. Racers found they rolled faster than solids, but – partly thanks to conflict with earlier patents unknown to him – Dunlop was never to be in the money, unless you count his appearance on Northern Ireland’s £10 note.
Stuck on you
Boyd’s tyres were tubeless, stuck on to the rim. Mending a puncture involved hours ungluing and reattaching. But in France in 1891, Édouard Michelin improvised a new system: an inner tube, set inside an adhesive-free, clinched tyre: quicker to repair, yet just as fast and comfortable. But the game-changer was arguably the puncture-repair outfit, devised by his compatriot Louis Rustin in the 1920s. It enabled riders – and racers – to fix punctures themselves at the roadside.
Learning puncture repair was a rite of passage for many post-war children. It often involved washing-up bowls of water, bent spoons, and pipe-sucking fathers explaining how rubber solution does not ‘glue’ but ‘vulcanises’. And it took hours.
Inner workings
Now most of us fix a flat in the time it takes to slurp an energy gel. Slip in a new inner tube; the breached one goes home for later repair, or recycling (not easy). We can use the time saved to argue about tubes versus tubeless, a curious echo of the Boyd/Michelin days. (‘Surely no point in tubeless if you have to take a spare inner tube anyway...’, etc). Almost puncture-proof tyres are a boon for utility and leisure riders. They shrug off glass jags and the like with a buttressing strip of a miracle material. But for racers, the weight penalty is clearly too much. That challenge of a flat tyre remains and can disrupt the best-laid team plans (see the 2022 Tour de France opening time trial).
We may be 130 years on from Dunlop and Michelin, but we haven’t quite solved the puncture problem yet. Which is, indeed, a bit of a letdown.