Harley-Davidson has been building motorcycles on the same Milwaukee block since 1906, long enough to collect a great deal of history that gets retold wrong. These stories stay with the record: what the engines were really called and why, who actually owned the company, which records came with a catch, and the riders who took the machines places the factory never planned.
Every tile in a Harley-Davidson Motorcycles game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Machines
nine stories
1The outboard motor man helped with the first engine
On the tile: Ole Evinrude1903
Harley-Davidson's own account of its first engine names an outsider. Ole Evinrude, a young machinist in the same Milwaukee neighborhood, gave advice while William Harley and Arthur Davidson developed their single-cylinder F-head in 1902 and 1903. It displaced 24.74 cubic inches and made about three horsepower. Another friend, Henry Melk, lent them his lathe. Evinrude went on to become the driving force behind outboard marine motors, so two American engine names grew out of one neighborhood.
The 45-degree V-twin that defines a Harley-Davidson nearly died at birth. The first one, sold for 1909, displaced 49.5 cubic inches and made about seven horsepower, and the company now says plainly that it proved sometimes unreliable and was offered for a single year. Harley tried again for 1911 with an improved valve train and waterproof ignition. That second attempt worked, and the 45-degree angle has been there ever since.
3A nickname built from a muffler and a coat of paint
On the tile: Silent Gray1907
The Henry Ford museum keeps a 1907 Harley-Davidson from the company's first generation of machines, and its catalog record explains the old nickname: the single was advertised as the Silent Gray Fellow because of its efficient muffler and muted gray color scheme. The mechanical details are just as plain. A leather belt carried power to the rear wheel, and a pulley that tightened that belt did the work of a clutch.
Harley-Davidson did not choose the name Knucklehead. The engine arrived for 1936 as the company's first production overhead-valve V-twin, an E model of 61 cubic inches keeping the traditional 45-degree cylinder angle, and riders decided the rocker covers and pushrod tubes looked like the knuckles of a closed hand. The nickname stuck so hard that the factory now uses it too. Every air-cooled Harley V-twin since has been built on that engine's basic architecture.
The second generation of the big twin came in 1948 with aluminum cylinder heads, hydraulic valve lifters, better oiling and roller bearings on the crank pin, and it weighed eight pounds less than the Knucklehead it replaced. Displacement stayed at 61 and 74 cubic inches. Riders looked at the new stamped rocker covers, decided they resembled cake pans, and the name Panhead stuck to the engine for good.
Walter Davidson announced the three-wheeled Servi-Car to stockholders in November 1931, and it stayed in the lineup for 41 years. Garages loved it. An optional tow bar hooked to a customer's bumper, so one employee could deliver a car and ride the Servi-Car home again. The workhorse also got somewhere first: by Harley-Davidson's account, the Servi-Car, not the Electra Glide, was the company's first motorcycle with an electric starter.
The hidden-suspension look that carried Harley-Davidson for decades was drawn by an outsider. Bill Davis, an engineer in St. Louis, disliked the exposed shock absorbers on his 1972 Super Glide and built a frame that tucked them under the seat, keeping the straight line from headstock to rear axle. He pitched it to Willie G. Davidson in 1976 and was turned down. With a partner he patented a version called the Sub Shock, and when that venture faltered Harley bought his patents, prototypes and tooling in 1982. The Softail followed for 1984.
8The first factory custom mixed parts from two bikes
On the tile: Super Glide1971
When Willie G. Davidson joined the company in 1963, the design department was two people: himself and a model maker. Some of his earliest work was on parts for Tomahawk Boats, a Harley-Davidson subsidiary. Then came the 1971 FX Super Glide, which combined the engine and frame of the big touring models with the lighter front fork of a Sportster. Harley-Davidson calls it the first factory custom, and mixing parts became an industry.
For the V-Rod in 2002, Harley-Davidson broke nearly every house rule at once, and it did not do the work alone. The company says the Revolution V-twin was developed with the assistance of Porsche. The cylinders sat at 60 degrees instead of 45, with double overhead camshafts, four valves per cylinder, liquid cooling and fuel injection. At 115 horsepower it set a new benchmark for a production Harley-Davidson engine.
1The tricycle on the vaudeville stage, so the story goes
On the tile: Anna Held1901Legend
Harley-Davidson's account of its own first spark comes with a hedge. The story goes that in 1901 William Harley and Arthur Davidson, boyhood friends who both worked at Barth Manufacturing, a Milwaukee elevator maker, went to a vaudeville show and watched the stage star Anna Held ride a three-wheeler propelled by a single-cylinder engine. The company will say only that the two later recalled that machine as a moment of inspiration. What is documented is what came next: within the year they were fitting engines to bicycles, using a friend's lathe.
The company outgrew its first workshop quickly. In 1904 the founders doubled the size of their small factory, and when they needed more they did not go to a bank. They borrowed $170 from James McLay, a beekeeping uncle the Davidsons called the Honey Uncle. William Harley was away that year, studying engineering at the University of Wisconsin; when the company incorporated in 1907 and issued its first stock, he took a smaller share in exchange for cash toward his degree.
In 1906 the founders put up a one-story factory on Chestnut Street, a block from the Davidson home, and Harley-Davidson has occupied that site ever since. Larger buildings swallowed the first one, and by 1918 the red brick that still holds the company's offices was in place. The Milwaukee architect A.C. Eschweiler drew the 1910 plans, with many windows for light and air. The street changed instead, becoming Juneau Avenue in 1931.
Crystal Haydel was one of the first women to work at Harley-Davidson, and possibly the very first. She was there by 1907, hired as a cashier, and like the founders she rode, encouraging newcomers to take up the sport. By the time she died in 1949 she sat on the board of directors. President William H. Davidson wrote that "Miss Haydel was a key figure in all major decisions."
Harley-Davidson had a distributor in Japan by 1912, and when the Depression closed export markets the company went further. Sankyo paid about $3,000 for blueprints plus rising yearly royalties, Harley engineers traveled over to set up the factory, and Japanese-built side-valve twins were sold under the name Rikuo, King of the Road. The arrangement ended in 1936, after Sankyo tested one of the new overhead-valve Knuckleheads and refused to license it.
Harley-Davidson keeps a large archive, and one of the questions it is asked most often is one it cannot answer. No record confirms who designed the Bar and Shield or what inspired it. What survives is paperwork: a trademark application filed in July 1910, and a later filing claiming continuous use of the mark since May 6 of that year. The version on fuel tanks today was revived in 1976 from a monogram patch the company had sold in 1931.
7Anti-aircraft guns, bowling parts, then motorcycles
On the tile: York plant1973
Harley-Davidson's Pennsylvania factory began as a Navy plant, built in 1941 to make 40mm Bofors anti-aircraft guns and mounts. It stayed in ordnance work after the war until AMF bought it in 1964 and filled it with bomb casings, missile components, bowling equipment, snowmobiles and garden tractors. Motorcycle assembly moved there from Milwaukee in 1973, carried on an overhead conveyor several miles long, with a metal grid below to shield the workers.
By 1981 Harley-Davidson had spent a dozen years as a subsidiary of AMF, the bowling and leisure goods conglomerate. That year thirteen of its own senior executives, led by Vaughn Beals, bought the company back, with quality and manufacturing efficiency as the stated aim. The Harley-Davidson Museum keeps the photograph of all thirteen investors, and among them stands Willie G. Davidson, the styling chief and a grandson of a founder.
In 1994 Harley-Davidson applied to register a trademark on what the application called the "exhaust sound of applicant's motorcycles, produced by V-Twin, common crankpin motorcycle engines when the goods are in use." Success would have placed the rumble alongside the MGM lion's roar and the NBC chimes. Rival manufacturers objected that the sound was not unique to Harley, and outside experts doubted the company could prove otherwise. Six years later Harley-Davidson gave up, and the application was abandoned.
Walter Davidson was a machinist who could ride. In 1908 he entered the Federation of American Motorcyclists endurance run in the Catskill Mountains of New York, earned a perfect 1,000 points, and did it with no support crew following him. The company's own history says that ride is what carried the Harley-Davidson name into motorcycling. He was also, since the incorporation the year before, the company's first president.
Before Harley-Davidson had a race team, it argued against racing. Company publications called the sport costly and dangerous, and Arthur Davidson wrote bluntly about the steep wooden saucers where riders reached frightening speeds. After a fatal crash at the Vailsburg motordrome in 1912 he dismissed such tracks as "murderdromes" and said the danger and the sensational headlines were turning competition into "poor advertising." Rivals kept winning and selling anyway, so Harley hired engineer Bill Ottaway in 1913 and fielded a team the next year.
Leslie Parkhurst started racing at thirteen on a Denver track and turned professional three years later. Harley-Davidson asked him to test a machine in Milwaukee in 1914, then signed him to the team that became the Wrecking Crew. Red hair and a permanent grin got him the name Smilin' Red, and the company's archives note that rain, broken pedals, even catching fire in practice would not keep him off the track. He set a 24-hour distance record at Sheepshead Bay.
In 1937, on the sand at Daytona Beach, Joe Petrali rode a specially built streamliner powered by a 61-cubic-inch Knucklehead to a motorcycle speed record of 136.183 mph. He quit racing in 1938, spent three years building race cars, and only then went to work for Howard Hughes. Hughes made him a top man at Hughes Aircraft, in charge of service and flight, and Petrali was the flight engineer the one time Hughes lifted his 200-ton flying boat off the water. Later he timed world speed records for the United States Auto Club.
5He won the Jack Pine, then ran the place for 31 years
On the tile: Bill Davidson1930
William H. Davidson, son of co-founder William A. Davidson, was an accomplished rider before he was an executive. In 1930, at twenty-five, he won the Jack Pine with a perfect score. That Michigan enduro ran 500 miles over two days of sand, stumps and creeks, and it wore out machines and riders alike. He had joined the company formally in 1928, and he became president in 1942, holding the job through the war, through rising imports and through recessions, and retiring in 1973.
A new AMA rule set one 750cc limit for every engine type, so Dick O'Brien's race shop ran a crash program and built the XR750 around a de-stroked iron-cylinder Sportster engine. It made competitive horsepower, then wrecked itself with its own heat. An all-aluminum engine arrived for 1972, and the machine turned nearly unbeatable: by Harley-Davidson's count it won 28 of the 37 AMA Grand National Championships between 1972 and 2008. The same model carried Evel Knievel over his ramps from 1970 to 1976.
Dennis Manning and Warner Riley built a sixteen-foot streamliner around a Sportster V-twin punched out to 89 cubic inches, and Harley-Davidson's Cal Rayborn lay down inside it on the Bonneville Salt Flats. On October 15, 1970, he set a world motorcycle land speed record at 255.380 mph. The next day he went quicker still, averaging 265.492. He steered by looking through side panels, with small air-powered skids to keep the machine upright.
8Harley-Davidson holds four road racing world titles
On the tile: Walter Villa1976
Grand Prix world championships are not what most people associate with Milwaukee, and yet Harley-Davidson has four of them. All were won by the Italian rider Walter Villa on a liquid-cooled two-stroke twin built at the former Aermacchi works and badged a Harley-Davidson RR250. Villa took the 250cc title in 1974, 1975 and 1976, and in that last season added the 350cc championship on a bored and stroked version of the same engine.
Scott Parker was riding at six and racing at twelve. He turned professional at seventeen, joined the Harley-Davidson team in 1981, won his first Grand National Championship in 1988 and took nine of them in eleven seasons, finishing with 94 national wins. For a quarter of a century nine was the ceiling, and nobody else reached it. Then Jared Mees matched the nine and, in 2024, won a tenth to stand alone.
1A mother and daughter rode to the Pacific and back
On the tile: Hotchkiss1915
On May 2, 1915, Effie Hotchkiss and her mother Avis left Brooklyn on a new Harley-Davidson three-speed twin with a sidecar, crossed the country, dipped their wheels in the Pacific at San Francisco and rode home again. They camped, met other riders, weathered storms, and once packed a rolled-up blanket into a flat tire to keep moving. The AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame calls Effie the first woman to complete a transcontinental motorcycle ride.
2One of the earliest Harley group rides drew 35 of 200
On the tile: Carl Lang1908
Motorcycle Illustrated, in its August 1, 1908 issue, reported on a gathering held that Sunday, June 14 in the south end of Chicago's Lincoln Park, apparently for Harley-Davidson owners only. Two hundred were expected and thirty-five turned up for the photograph. Production numbers from those years are unclear, but the company's archives suggest a turnout of two hundred would have been more than half of every machine Harley had built to that point. Carl Lang, the first dealer, arranged the outing and was reported to be wearing a suit of yellow leather.
3The magazine's advice columnist worked for the factory
On the tile: Uncle Frankfrom 1912
Howard Jameson met Arthur Davidson in 1911 and was offered a job on the spot, hired the next year for his electrical background. He became the company's ambassador to riding clubs and ran its publicity, and he wrote an advice column for riders in The Enthusiast under the pen name Uncle Frank. Readers taking counsel from a genial uncle were in fact reading the factory. Jameson later ran a dealership of his own.
Eldred Harrington was a teacher and geologist with at least six advanced degrees who began writing for The Enthusiast in 1944, taking his own photographs along the Pony Express route, the Santa Fe Trail and Route 66. His introduction to readers carried a detail of wartime life: because his work locating ore deposits mattered to war production, the War Production Board approved an order permitting him to buy a 1944 Harley-Davidson to replace his 1930 machine.
In May 1956 Harley-Davidson's own magazine, The Enthusiast, put a young singer on its cover for a feature story titled "Who Is Elvis Presley?" He had chosen a two-tone Deluxe KH with a windshield and a buddy seat. He rode it until November, moved up to an FLH, and sold the KH to a riding friend named Fleming Horne. Harley-Davidson bought the motorcycle back in 1995, and it went into the museum collection.
Evel Knievel and the Harley-Davidson XR750 belong together, but not at the jump that made him famous. On December 31, 1967, at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, he set off toward the fountains 141 feet away on a red, white and blue Triumph. He came down badly, and the crash left him battered and made him internationally famous. The Harleys came afterward: he jumped an XR750 from 1970 to 1976, and the Smithsonian holds his 1972 machine.
Alfonso Sotomayor Canales began racing in Mexico in the 1930s and was stunt riding by the 1940s, later performing with the Mexico City traffic police team. One of his claims to fame was the Salto de la Muerte, the Jump of Death: a ramp about 16 inches high and 20 feet long, his number seven Panhead, and a row of people lying on the ground. He worked up to 48 of them, raised money for the Red Cross, and performed the jump until he retired in 1977.
Fred H. Warr's father opened a London motorcycle business in 1924. After the Second World War the family kept it alive by buying used military Harley-Davidsons, refurbishing them and selling them on, and before long they sold nothing else. When Fred took over in 1956, Warr's was the only Harley-Davidson dealership in the United Kingdom. He helped found a British riders club and won the RAC National Rally in 1974.
As the Statue of Liberty's centennial approached, Harley-Davidson joined the fundraising for her restoration with a ride across the country. It left Los Angeles on September 10, 1985: chief executive Vaughn Beals and his wife Eleanore leading a northern route, styling vice president Willie G. Davidson and his wife Nancy taking a southern one. Thirteen riders went coast to coast, while thousands more joined for a few miles or a few days. Five French riders, led by a dealer from Nice, met them in Atlanta.