How the question of comfort was raised by automotive pioneers?
There are three concatenated elements between the driver and road contributing to comfort in a car: The tires, the suspension and the seat. By extrapolation, we can integrate the notion of ergonomics through cockpit controls, physical protection, and the envelope formed by the bodywork. This chain of comfort starts around the wheels with the tires. At first they were solid, hard rubber bandages. Their main purpose was to reduce the noise steel wheels made on the paving stones. Then came the invention of the pneumatic tire by Dunlop in 1888, and later still, the removable inner tube from Michelin in 1895. After that, development was fairly rapid: in less than 10 years, cars went from steel rims to pneumatic tires with inner tubes. Some even tried to incorporate springs in the spokes of the wheels to deaden the shock between the rim and the hub. The result was a wheel which didnt always revolve around its center! What about the suspension? Coaches and wagons have had suspension systems s
