The motorcycle began as an engine looking for something to carry it, and within twenty years it had factories, races and a vocabulary of its own. These thirty-six stories run from a wooden frame in a German workshop to a salt flat in Utah, by way of a helicopter engineer who disliked motorcycles, a piglet named Johnnie, and a man who rebuilt a 1920 Indian in his shed until it went 184 miles an hour.
Every tile in a Motorcycles game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Makers and Marques
nine stories
1The first Harley factory was ten feet by fifteen
On the tile: Milwaukee shed1903
Harley-Davidson's first factory was a wooden shed in the Davidson family's Milwaukee backyard, ten feet by fifteen. William C. Davidson, bothered by his sons' project filling his basement, told them to move it out to the yard, so they built the shed. The company's own history calls that shed the first Harley-Davidson factory, and the place where the first Harley-Davidson was sold, to a friend named Henry Meyer. Everything built since traces back to a building smaller than a one-car garage.
2Indian began with a bicycle built to split the wind
On the tile: Hedstrom1901
Bicycle racers of the 1890s chased motorized tandems that broke the wind ahead of them, and Oscar Hedstrom built and rode those pacers. Early in 1901 he signed a partnership with George Hendee, a Springfield bicycle manufacturer, and rented bench space in a Connecticut bicycle works then in receivership, a dollar a day, to build a prototype. It ran by May and went to Springfield to be shown. Within a decade their company was the largest motorcycle maker in the world.
BMW made its name on aircraft engines. When it needed something else to build, chief engineer Max Friz took a flat twin, turned it across the frame so both cylinders stood out in the open air, and drove the rear wheel through a shaft instead of a chain. The R 32 appeared at the Paris Motor Show in 1923 with 494 cc and 8.5 horsepower. More than a century later BMW still sells boxer twins with shaft drive, laid out the way Friz drew them.
Carlo Guzzi, Giorgio Parodi and Giovanni Ravelli served together in Italian naval aviation during the First World War, and between flights they planned a motorcycle company for when the fighting stopped. Ravelli, an experienced pilot, died during a test flight on August 11, 1919. Guzzi and Parodi went ahead without him, and when the company was founded in March 1921 it carried a spread-winged eagle, the badge of Italian naval aviation, in his memory. It has been Moto Guzzi's mark ever since.
On July 4, 1926, Antonio Cavalieri Ducati and his sons Adriano, Bruno and Marcello founded Società Scientifica Radio Brevetti Ducati in Bologna, a company built around radio communication. Two decades of radio parts went by before it made anything with wheels, and even then it was not a motorcycle. The Cucciolo of 1946, the puppy, was a small auxiliary engine meant to be clamped onto a bicycle. The racing red arrived much later.
6The Vespa was drawn by a man who disliked motorcycles
On the tile: D'Ascanio1946
Piaggio built aircraft until the war took away the market, and Enrico Piaggio handed the scooter problem to Corradino D'Ascanio, a helicopter engineer who disliked motorcycles: the greasy exposed chain, the awkward tire change, the whole arrangement. His answer borrowed from airframes. A pressed-steel monocoque body carried everything, a leg shield kept the rider clean, and the engine sat beside the rear wheel. The patent was filed in Florence on April 23, 1946.
Torakusu Yamaha was a watchmaker until a school in Hamamatsu asked him to repair its reed organ in 1887. The organ he built afterward was criticized for poor tuning, so he studied music theory until he could make one that held its pitch. In 1898 his company took a tuning fork as its mark, and the three forks of the modern badge stand for melody, harmony and rhythm. Yamaha's first motorcycle, the 1955 YA-1, was chestnut red at a time when motorcycles were black, and riders called it the red dragonfly.
Before it built motorcycles, the Enfield Cycle Company made precision parts for the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield. That work produced a cannon in the badge and a motto, Made Like a Gun, meant to promise the accuracy of a service rifle. Motorcycles followed in 1901. The Bullet that came out of the Redditch works has been called the longest-lived motorcycle design in history, and it is built today in India rather than England.
9Honda started with surplus radio generator engines
On the tile: Army engine1946
In 1946 Soichiro Honda came across a small two-stroke engine built to run the generator for an army wireless set, and decided it could push a bicycle instead. He bought every one left at the Mikuni factories, about five hundred. He did not simply bolt them on: he took each engine apart, reworked it, put it back together and test-rode the result before selling it. When the surplus ran out, he started building his own.
1The first gasoline two-wheeler had outrigger wheels
On the tile: Einspur1885
Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach needed a rolling test bed for a small gasoline engine, so late in 1885 they hung one in a wooden frame at Bad Cannstatt and called it the Einspur, the single-track. It made half a horsepower, and sources put its top speed anywhere between seven and twelve miles an hour. It also carried a pair of spring-loaded outrigger wheels to hold it upright, which is why people still argue about whether it counts as a motorcycle. The original was lost in a fire in 1903.
Carl Neracher's machine steered on a pivot at the front hub instead of forks and sat the rider low inside a pressed-steel frame behind a huge fender. A friction drive did the work of a gearbox: a flywheel spun by the engine pressed against an alloy wheel that slid across its face to change the ratio. The name worked twice, as a play on Neracher and on how nearly a car the thing was. About sixteen thousand were built on both sides of the Atlantic.
Fritz Cockerell put a 640 cc five-cylinder rotary engine inside the Megola's front wheel. The crankshaft doubled as a fixed axle and the cylinders spun around it, six turns for every turn of the wheel. There was no clutch and no gearbox, so you started it by pushing the machine or by spinning the front wheel with the bike up on its stand, and the owner's manual advised a rider who had to stop to ride small circles in the road instead. Toni Bauhofer took a sports model to 88 miles an hour at Berlin's AVUS circuit.
After 1925 every Brough Superior SS100 came with a written guarantee that the machine had already been timed at 100 miles an hour or better over a flying quarter mile. A magazine road tester had christened the marque the Rolls-Royce of Motorcycles, and Brough put the phrase in his advertising. T. E. Lawrence bought one of the first SS100s in 1925, after three of the slower SS80s. He was riding another near Wareham in 1935 when he swerved around two boys on bicycles, lost control, and died six days later.
The Army's Harley was a 45-cubic-inch side-valve V-twin with its compression dropped to 5 to 1 so it would run on 74-octane gasoline, fitted with blackout lamps, leg shields, a skid plate, saddlebags and a heavy oil-bath air cleaner for dust. Tens of thousands were built during the war, and some thirty thousand of those went to the Soviet Union under Lend-Lease. Crews used them to carry messages and escort convoys rather than to fight. In Europe the nickname stuck: the Liberator.
Past a certain engine speed a valve spring loses the race with the camshaft, and the valve floats instead of closing. Fabio Taglioni's answer at Ducati was to close the valves mechanically as well as open them, with a second rocker, so that each valve is tied to the cam the whole way around. He called it desmodromic, from Greek words for bond and track. The 125 GP Desmo raced in 1956 and won the Swedish Grand Prix. Ducati still builds engines this way.
In September 1956 a Texan team working on a shoestring budget ran a cigar-shaped streamliner across the Bonneville salt with a Triumph engine inside it, and Johnny Allen averaged 214.4 miles an hour over the mile. They had beaten NSU, then the biggest motorcycle manufacturer in the world. The FIM would not ratify it: not because anyone doubted the timing, but because the equipment lacked the federation's seal of approval. Triumph named a motorcycle after the place anyway, the T120 Bonneville for 1959, the number standing for its claimed top speed.
Honda put four cylinders, four exhaust pipes, an electric starter and a front disc brake on one production motorcycle and announced it at $1,495, in a market where large machines ran from $2,800 to $4,000. Soichiro Honda himself insisted on the disc brake. The two thousand dealers in the room applauded. The company had planned on fifteen hundred a year; the orders turned that into fifteen hundred a month, and then three thousand.
The Super Cub went on sale in August 1958: a step-through frame, a small engine, no clutch lever, and a shape aimed at people who would never describe themselves as motorcyclists. By 2017 Honda was building the series at sixteen plants in fifteen countries and selling it in more than a hundred and sixty. On October 19 that year, fifty-nine years after the first one, the company announced the hundred millionth.
On May 14, 1914 Erwin Baker rode into New York City, having covered more than three thousand miles from San Diego on an Indian in eleven and a half days. The record he broke had stood since 1911 at twenty days, nine hours and one minute, so he took almost nine days off it, on roads that across much of the West were barely roads. Reporters christened him Cannon Ball, and the name stayed with him for the rest of his life.
Augusta and Adeline Van Buren left New York on July 4, 1916, each riding her own Indian Powerplus, and reached San Francisco in early September. Somewhere in the middle they rode to the summit of Pikes Peak. They were stopped and arrested more than once for wearing men's riding clothes. The trip was an argument as much as a journey: that women could serve as army dispatch riders and free men for other duty.
Bessie Stringfield made eight long solo rides across the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, much of it through a segregated South that was unfriendly and unsafe for people of color. During the Second World War she carried documents for the Army as a civilian motorcycle courier. The American Motorcyclist Association inducted her into its Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 2002.
The family story was that Dot Robinson's mother rode to the hospital in a sidecar on the day Dot was born, in 1912. Robinson ran a Harley-Davidson dealership in Detroit with her husband Earl and competed in the Jack Pine, a Michigan enduro that wore out machines and riders alike. In 1940 she and Linda Dugeau founded the Motor Maids, the first national women's motorcycle club in the United States.
John Surtees won seven motorcycle world championships for MV Agusta between 1956 and 1960, racing in the 350 and 500 cc classes. Then he changed sports. In 1964 he took the Formula One drivers' title for Ferrari, clinching it in Mexico when both of his rivals struck trouble in the same race. He remains the only world champion on both two wheels and four.
Giacomo Agostini won 15 world championships, more than any other motorcycle racer, along with 122 grands prix. Eight of the titles came in the 500 cc class and seven in the 350, most of them on MV Agustas, with two at the end on Yamahas. He rode in the world championship from 1964 to 1977, and for five straight seasons he took the 350 and the 500 in the same year.
Mike Hailwood left motorcycle grand prix racing in 1967, drove Formula One cars, broke a leg badly in a 1974 crash and retired. In 1978 he came back to the Isle of Man for the first time in eleven years and entered the Formula One TT on a Ducati. He caught Phil Read's Honda, went past it and won by nearly two minutes; Read's engine gave up on the fifth lap, long after the race had been settled. It is still called one of the great comebacks in motor racing.
Burt Munro spent decades in New Zealand rebuilding a 1920 Indian Scout, making parts by hand. In 1967, at sixty-eight, he ran it at Bonneville, and his certificate recorded 183.586 miles an hour. Decades later his son John worked back through the two-way average, found an arithmetic mistake, and in 2014 the AMA corrected the figure to 184.087. The class record was still standing fifty years later.
The most famous motorcycle jump in movies is credited to Steve McQueen, who was a genuinely good rider and helped work the stunt out. The film's insurers would not let him do it. His friend Bud Ekins, a desert racer and Triumph dealer, made the jump in 1962 on a Triumph TR6 dressed up to look German. Triumph's own account of the scene names Ekins, and the restored machine is at the Triumph factory.
The first Tourist Trophy, run on May 28, 1907, was meant to prove that touring motorcycles were practical, so fuel was rationed. Single-cylinder machines had to average 90 miles to the gallon and twins 75, and there were rules for saddles, pedals, mudguards and silencers as well. Charlie Collier won the single-cylinder class on a Matchless and Rem Fowler the twin class on a Norton, over a fifteen-mile course based at St John's. The mountain came later.
In 1911 the TT moved onto the Snaefell Mountain Course, the long lap over the hills the race still uses. Indian, from Springfield, Massachusetts, turned up with two-speed gearboxes, clutches and all-chain drive as standard equipment, which mattered a great deal on a course with a mountain in it. Oliver Godfrey won the first Senior TT at 47.63 miles an hour over five laps, and Indians took second and third behind him.
Brooklands, in Surrey, opened in 1907 as the world's first banked motor racing circuit built from scratch for the purpose. Hugh and Ethel Locke King put it on their own estate: concrete, a hundred feet wide, with banked sections nearly thirty feet high. Ethel led the first procession of cars around it in June, in her open Itala. Motorcycles began racing there in 1908, and riders formed their own club the following year, the British Motorcycle Racing Club, known as Bemsee. The last meeting was held in August 1939.
The story goes that Harley-Davidsons became hogs because Ray Weishaar of the factory racing team carried a piglet named Johnnie on a victory lap after a hundred-mile race at Marion, Indiana on September 6, 1920. The pig and the photograph are real. Harley-Davidson's own account is careful, though: no single use of the phrase can be traced to that day. What it does reprint is a note from the week saying "the pig hogged all the road."
On March 29, 1924 a club in Camberley, Surrey ran an off-road race with none of the usual trials apparatus. No observed sections, no penalties for putting a foot down; whoever came around the long course twice first won, and a crowd reported in the thousands turned out to watch. Because there were no observed sections, the ACU, British motorcycling's governing body, ruled it could not be called a trial, so the organizers called their Southern Scott event a scramble instead. Scrambling is what Britain called motocross for decades.
J.C. Hoel, known as Pappy, bought an Indian franchise in Sturgis, South Dakota in 1936, then gathered friends into a club, the Jackpine Gypsies. On August 14, 1938 the club put on the first AMA-sanctioned race in town and called the weekend the Black Hills Motor Classic. Riders camped in the Hoels' backyard behind the dealership, and Pappy's wife Pearl and the other club wives fed them. Participation quadrupled to 800 riders the following year, and the rally has been growing, more or less, ever since.
On September 13, 1948 Rollie Free took a factory-tuned Vincent onto the Bonneville salt and came up just short of 150 miles an hour. Blaming the drag of his racing leathers, he peeled them off, stretched out flat along the top of the machine in swimming trunks, and averaged 150.313 on the next attempt. The photograph of that run is one of the best known in all of motorcycling, and the machine has been called the bathing suit bike ever since.
Grand prix motorcycle racing was decades old before anyone was crowned a world champion. In 1949 six meetings were strung together into the first championship, and it opened at the Isle of Man TT, where Harold Daniell won the first 500 cc world championship race on June 17 by a minute and a half from his Norton teammate Johnny Lockett. Les Graham took the 500 cc title on an AJS Porcupine by a single point, and AJS took the constructors' title by a single point as well.
Honda had come to the Isle of Man in 1959 as an unknown entered in the smallest class, and added the 250 cc class the year after. In 1961 it won both the 125 cc and the 250 cc races and filled every one of the top five places in each. Honda's own history of the week puts it plainly: the sweep showed the world what the company could engineer. Nobody called them unknown again.