Boxer

Mono Monday: Inventions of the 19th Century - The Motorcycle

This is my big beauty, she's not got particularly elegant lines but she does have an enormous amount of teutonic practical efficiency and reliability.  If you want to go a long way on uncertain road surfaces you can do a lot worse than choosing one of these.  I've come to quite like the look of her over the years, but I appreciate she's not everybody's cup of tea.  Certainly you won't get hoards of enthusiasts standing round admiring your machine when you park her up.  To each their own.

I'd always assumed that there was, somewhere in the history books, a note of the inventor of the petrol driven motorcycle.  At one stage I had thought that it was Mr Daimler.  However, life, and indeed history, turns out to be messy when you start looking into the details.

When you think about it, its a bizarre form of travel. The design requires you to proceed precariously on two wheels, with a small explosion taking place between you knees, while at the same time you balance a highly combustible fuel source on your lap.  It all seems a bit unlikely.  Particularly when you realise just how fast these things can go.  They are much easier to ride now than they used to be, but even so a fair amount of skill and road awareness is required if you want to stay safe.

Still, back to our history lesson...

The bicycle having been invented, the first attempts at adding an engine were not by way of petrol but steam.  A French blacksmith Michaux had been the first to add pedals to make a bicycle and his son went on to add a steam engine to create a steam velocipede in 1867. Unsurprisingly the idea didn't go much further.

Mr Daimler did indeed start adding a petrol engine to vehicles in 1885 but his  vehicle has very little in common with a motorcycle and was called a Reitwagen (a riding car).  On that basis alone I think we must discount it as the first motorbike.

Instead, it seems that during the late 1880s there were a large number of engineers in a number of countries all busily trying redesign their bicycles in order to add a petrol engine to them.  But what is clear is that in 1896 the Excelsior Company in Coventry were the first to offer petrol driven motorcycles that the public could actually buy.