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Who Invented The Motorcycle With so much confusion and gray areas in so many arenas of our lives, it is comforting to think we can ask certain questions and approach certain subjects with an expectation of closure. Who invented the light bulb? Thomas Edison. Clearly this is not the case with motorcycles, for if it were this article would have begun and ended with only one or two names, and maybe some dates of birth and death. If you assumed then from the verbosity above that “who invented the motorcycle” is a question without real closure, you are indeed correct. The invention of the motorcycle is sort of like the submarine, there were a number of surprisingly early prototypes that saw limited application before a truly usable model came about. For this reason any discussion of the invention of motorcycles begins with the bike.
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Motorcycles are now distant descendents the so-called “safety" bicycle. These were the first bicycles to have front and back wheels of equal size and pedals. (As opposed to those tall ones with the huge wheel, which to our modern eyes are clearly unsafe.) Safety bicycles were the thing around 1880, and it was in 1885 that Gottlieb Daimler, eventually of Daimler-Benz Corporation, is said to have built the first motorcycle. Gottlieb’s design used the wooden frame and iron-banded wooden-spoke wheels common to the bicycles of his day. This frame, however, was fitted with a one-cylinder engine. Perhaps because Daimler-Benz would become one of the great automobile corporations, Gottlieb Daimler is popularly considered the motorcycle’s inventor.
History is seldom so simple as to make responsible just one man for most inventions. If a motorcycle is simply a two-wheeled means of transport that uses steam propulsion, then its very first inventor is one Sylvester Howard Roper from Roxbury Massachusetts. Roper’s design utilized a charcoal fired, two-cylinder engine, and used a frame of wood and iron even more crude than Gottlieb’s, for it was based upon the bicycle frames of some two decades before Gottlieb’s design. Unfortunately for Mister Roper, his invention remained nothing but a curiosity at circuses and county fairs, so he never entered popular acknowledgement as a long dead inventor of something we take for granted. In the 1890s two new motorcycle designs were produced: the Millet of 1892, a 5-cylinder model that never really took off, and a design from two German inventors in Munich, the Hildebrand & Wolfmueller.
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Despite its tedious name, the Hildebrand & Wolfmueller was to be the first successful production of a motorcycle ever, and so sources occasionally do state them as the brains behind the motorbike. The Hildebrand & Wolfmueller resembles in some respects many motorcycles of today. A step-through frame with the engine mounted low, the first motorcycle with a radiator/water tank, it was Hildebrand and Wolfmueller who arranged and condensed the motorcycle’s engine and mechanisms into a more practical state. |
It was around this same time that the French firm, DeDion-Buton, built an engine small enough, light enough, and rapidly-produced enough to make possible the production of motorcycles on a massive scale. The DeDion-Buton engine was copied throughout the budding industry and made possible the birth of the more familiar sounding names of Indian and Harley-Davidson in 1901 and 1902 respectively.
To ask then who invented the motorcycle is to really ask what elements came together to create this means of transport as we know it today. An eccentric from Massachusetts, German and French inventors and engineers, the creation of compact engines by DeDion-Buton, all these are responsible for the result. However, this level of exactness is only important for you, the curious. If you are ever asked, “who invented the motorcycle?” in a game of Trivial Pursuit, forget for a moment everything you just read and now know. Control your will to nuance and say the man who invented the motorcycle is none other than Herr Gottlieb Daimler.
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