The Motorcycle
The Motorcycle was born in 1885 when Gottlieb Daimler attached an “Otto” gasoline engine to a wooden bicycle frame. The “Otto” had been invented in 1876 by engineer (and Daimler’s former boss), Nicolaus August Otto and was the world’s first “four-stroke internal combusion engine”.
In 1895 a French company developed an engine that was to make mass production possible. It was a small, light, high revving four-stroke single, and used battery-and-coil ignition, doing away with the troublesome hot-tube. Bore and stroke figures of 50mm by 70mm gave a displacement of 138cc.
The first US production motorcycle was the Orient-Aster, built by the Metz Company in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1898. It predated the Indian motorcycle (1901) by three years, and Harley-Davidson (1902) by four. Sylvester Howard Roper of Roxbury, Massachusetts may be credited with the first idea of a powered bicycle, when in 1867 he stuck a charcoal-fired two-cylinder engine onto a bicycle frame. The connecting rods directly drove a crank on the rear wheel. Here’s a hot collection Bikebabes.
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