Originally published in Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts, May 1, 1869
The prototypical Dandy bicyclist, after 1869, with an early pedal cycle, of the type patented by brothers Marius, Aimé and Pierre Olivier, ex-associates of Pierre Michaux. Note the delicate footrests above the front wheel for coasting, and the elaborate brake pedal operating the 'spoon' brake pad on the rear wheel. The pedals are connected directly to the front axle, so speed and effort is related to the wheel diameter. As pneumatic tires would not be invented for 20 years, the steel rims of these bicycles gave rise to the 'boneshaker' nickname, although the tempered steel spring holding the saddle would have relieved many of the shocks on the unmade roads of the day. The first velocipedes were also called 'Dandy Horses', as young men were their most enthusiastic adherents, much as the author of this article from 1869. Picture this fellow as our author, who sadly remains unnamed.
I am not ashamed to admit having always cherished a peculiar admiration, at one time amounting to awe, for anything that would go round. A wheel has never been without its charm for me. I remember, at school, the affection with which I regarded wheels of all sorts, and how all my favourite toys as a child were rotary ones. The knife-grinder who used periodically to stop in front of our play-ground gates to grind the young gentlemen's knives, has probably died without knowing the inward comfort he administered to my breast, through the opportunities he afforded me of seeing his wheel go round at public expense.
Only the other day, I confided to an old friend that I still possessed a sneaking regard for wheels, and though he rewarded my confidence with a pitiful sneer, I know that this wretched old hypocrite himself keeps a wonderful brass top that will spin for an hour, under a glass case on his study-table, and in secret delights to watch it in motion.
A clever marine engineer, who loves wheels too, once told me with great gravity that the human mind has never yet discovered anything so wonderful as the principle of the common wheelbarrow, 'an invention,' he said, 'to which that of the steam-engine itself is nothing. The wheelbarrow,' he went on, 'is the only example I am acquainted with in which the very weight of a load is fairly utilised as a locomotive power.' There was a copy of Punch on my table. Our conversation had turned to the subject of wheelbarrows from looking at Mr Keene's vignette, in which, some three years ago, Mr Punch was depicted as Blondin, but performing the impossible feat of wheeling himself in a wheelbarrow along a tight-rope in the Crystal Palace transept.
Karl de Drais (full name Karl Friedrich Christian Ludwig Freiherr Drais von Sauerbronn) invented the 'Fahrsmachine' (running machine), first presented to the world on June 12, 1817 in Mannheim, Germany, a steerable two-wheeler. Drais was a Baron but an advocate of democracy, so dropped the royal 'von' from his name in the 1840s, and suffered greatly for his beliefs. His is a fascinating story! [Wikipedia]My engineer friend then remarked that, putting aside the tight-rope business, he was firmly convinced that Mr Keene had in jest represented what would by-and-by be accepted in serious earnest as the only correct principle on which to construct a self-driven vehicle - namely, employing the weight of the body as a propelling power, and relying on the fact of motion as the means of balance. One thing will at least be conceded by any person who will take the trouble to turn to the sketch, and that is, notwithstanding all recognised notions and experience to the contrary, the picture of a man driving himself in a wheelbarrow looks strangely plausible, probably from the fact, that the mind of the observer communicates motion to the wheel, and is satisfied to receive that as the explanation of the balance.
The two-wheeled velocipede or bicycle is in part a realisation of Mr Keene's picture. It depends upon motion for its balance. The two wheels, one in front of the other, with a saddle between, whether mounted by a rider or not, will not stand upright for a single instant at rest; but, like the boy's hoop, being kept trolling, they maintain a perfect equilibrium.
A Wonder Which Drove All Paris Mad
The bicycle can hardly be called a 'new invention,' being to a great extent a modification of that very old toy-vehicle of our fathers, the hobby-horse, whereon the rider used to sit and row himself along, so to speak, by paddling with his feet on the ground; at the same time, the entire reliance on the principle that motion would be, under any circumstances, sufficient to produce balance, is sufficiently novel almost to justify the use of such a term. The French appear to be entitled to whatever of credit attaches to the original invention of the hobby-horse (a miserable steed at best, which wore out the toes of a pair of boots at every journey. M. Blanchard, the celebrated aeronaut, and M. Masurier conjointly manufactured the first of these machines in 1779, which was then described as 'a wonder which drove all Paris mad.' The French are probably justified, moreover, in claiming as their own the development of this crude invention into the present velocipede, for, in 1862, a M. Riviere, a French subject, residing in England, deposited in the British Patent Office a minute specification of a machine identical with that now in use. His description was, however, unaccompanied by any drawing or sketch, and he seems to have taken no further steps in the matter than to register a theory which he never carried into practice. Subsequently, the bicycle was re-invented by the French and by the Americans almost simultaneously, and indeed, both nations claim priority in introducing it. It came into public notoriety at the last French International Exhibition, from which time the rage for them has gradually developed itself, until in this present 1869, it may be said, much as it was a century ago, that Paris has again been driven mad on velocipedes.
The Dandy Machine! A Michaux bicycle of 1868, as produced commercially from that year, thanks to the Michaux's association with the fréres Olivier. Earlier incarnations of the pedal-cycle were built by the Michaux pere et fils, in concert with Pierre Lallemant, who also patented his pedal-cycle, but in the USA, claiming it was he who had invented the machine: Lallemant filed 137 patents in the USA in 1868, Michaux filed 187 patents in France in 1869. [Wikipedia]Extensive foundries are now established in Paris for the sole purpose of supplying the iron-work, while some scores of large manufactories are taxing their utmost resources to meet the daily increasing demand for these vehicles. The prices of good serviceable velocipedes range from two hundred and fifty to four hundred francs (ten to sixteen pounds), at a less price than which a really good machine cannot be obtained either in England or France. The best French pattern is that of Michaux et Cie., which is the one now adopted by most of the English builders with more or less correctness. The height of the driving-wheel most suitable for general use is three feet.
Ernest Michaux, son of Pierre, who likely thought up the pedal-cycle with Pierre Lallemant, and built the first examples in the mid-1860s at his father's workshop [Wikipedia]The advantages of the bicycle over the three and four wheeled velocipedes are many and considerable. It is less than half the weight of the old machine, being but a little over forty pounds; and the friction is reduced to something like two-thirds. The power operating directly on the cranks, instead of being communicated through long levers, is wholly utilised, whilst the motion of the feet is more analogous to that of walking. When once accustomed to the use of the two-wheeled velocipede, it is not at all fatiguing, whereas the many-wheelers condemn their riders to a term of hard labour. As the result of several months' experience in driving a bicycle, I have no hesitation in estimating it as a clear gain of five to one in comparison with walking. That is to say, the rider may go five miles with the same expenditure of labour as in walking one, and after a journey of fifty miles he will feel no more fatigue than after having walked ten. Notwithstanding appearances to the contrary to the unaccustomed eye, the bicycle is, moreover, a safer machine than any velocipede with three wheels, and far more under control. To turn a corner with a three-wheeler at anything like speed, is a most hazardous experiment, resulting almost certainly in a 'spill' - because the speed lifts the hind-wheel describing the outermost circle, from the ground; whereas the two-wheeler, when on the turn, stands at an inclination like a skater's body, more or less acute according to the quickness of the curve to be described.
The two-wheeler, when on the turn, stands at an inclination like a skater's body.
With regard to the speed which may be attained, fifteen miles an hour, under the most favourable circumstances, that is, good hard road, not level, but without very steep hills, and no wind blowing, is probably the limit of the velocipede's powers; but a pace of nine or ten miles an hour may be maintained for five or six hours without distress. Long journeys on level road are perhaps the most fatiguing, on account of their monotony, because then the feet, as in walking, are nearly always at work. Still, even in this case, the driver can maintain his speed with one foot, resting the other on the leg-rest; or, if disposed, he may even place both feet on the rests, and run four or five hundred yards without working at all. The slightly increased labour of climbing a hill is nothing to the zest imparted by a knowledge that there is sure to be a hill the other side to go down, and that is the most luxurious travelling that can be imagined. Descending an incline at full speed, balanced on a beautifully tempered steel spring that takes every jolt from the road - wheels spinning over the ground so lightly they scarce seem to touch it - the driver's legs rested comfortably on the cross-bar in front - shooting the hill at a speed of thirty or forty miles an hour - the sensation is only comparable to that of flying, and is worth all the pains it costs in learning to experience it.
The sensation is only comparable to that of flying.
The velocipedist feels but one pang when he reaches the bottom of a hill, and that is, that it is over; and but one exquisite wish, which is, that the entire country might somehow become metamorphosed into down-hill. But the hill is bountiful even after one has left it, for the impetus derived from a good incline will carry the rider at least the hill's length on level ground before he need remove his feet from the rests and commence working again. The slightest incline on a good road is sufficient to obviate all necessity for working with the feet, so that what little labour there is (and it is of the easiest), is by no means incessant. In a journey of twenty miles on good road, a driver should not work more than twelve - the inclines do the rest. Of course, there are hills so steep that to ascend them is impossible: yet, for myself, living in a hilly county, which I have pretty well explored on my two-wheeled steed, I can reckon up their number on the fingers of one hand. There are also hills where the labour becomes as much as, or more than, walking, but these must be of a gradient something like one in twelve, and such hills are not frequent. When they do occur, the rider may, if he will, dismount.
The 'sensation of flying' inspired the concept of adding a motor to the bicycle, to extend the feeling indefinitely. How right they were! The joys of motorcycling were imagined as early as 1818 in a lithograph, and explicitly so in 1820 by Karl von Drais himself, who mentioned in an 1822 interview “I am thinking of improving Draisine by steam." Louis-Guillame Perraux patented his steam-powered velocipede in 1871 (seen above), using a Michaux-type bicycle with a small steam engine modified for the purpose. Sylvester H. Roper had the same idea in the USA, perhaps two years earlier, but used a non-pedal cycle as his foundation [Archives INPI France]It is a subject of smiling pity to many of the uninitiated to behold a velocipedist dragging his horse after him up a hill - and cruelly realised, too, in the case of three and four wheeled machines; but the bicycle is better than any walking-stick to assist a person up an incline, even when only walking beside it. Resting one elbow on the saddle, and leaning the weight of the body on that, while guiding the handle with the other hand, the machine becomes a positive assistance instead of an incumbrance. This sounds like fiction, but it is fact. Experto crede.
The circa 1871 steam velocipede of Louis-Guillame Perreaux, seen outside its home, the Sceaux Museum in Paris. The machine is exhibited occasionally, and is a fascinating construction, well worth study to read Perreaux's mind on how to make bicycle fly. [Musée Sceaux]There are persons who advertise to teach the use of the velocipede in 'a few hours.' Not long ago an enterprising French master advertised to teach the French language (in the intervals of seasickness) during the voyage from Dover to Calais. It should not be concealed that it requires as much time to learn the use of the bicycle as to learn to skate - and there are also occasional falls incidental to learning either. To urge the time necessary to acquire its use as an objection against the two-wheeled steed, would, however, be manifestly unjust. So difficult is it to balance the human body on merely two small legs and a pair of feet, in an upright position (a position such as would be scarcely possible to make an exact model of a man, even without life, retain for a single instant), that it has taken most of us a twelve-month to learn how to do that.
Sylvester H. Roper's 1867 'self-propeller' used a hickory frame without pedals, apparently built for the purpose. The water tank doubles as the seat, while the burner sits low under the rider, and the exhaust (mostly excess heat) exits behind the rider via the stack. The rider twists the handlebars to open up the steam valves - the first motorcycle twistgrip. Roper may have built the first motorcycle, although the same concept was pictured in 1818 in France. This machine can be seen at the Smithsonian Institution [Wikipedia]It is sufficient to say that a person may attain the management of a two-wheeled steed in less time than that of a four-footed one, and when he has done so, for speed, endurance, and inexpensiveness, the former will at least bear favourable comparison with the latter. As in skating, a week's steady and persevering practice is needful to acquire a comfortable balance, and gain control over the unaccustomed form of support. The 'falls' referred to above, as happening in learning the velocipede, are nothing to those incurred in learning to skate. No one should mount a bicycle until he is acquainted with the way to get off, which is really the first lesson. Whichever way the machine is going to fall, the learner has only to put out his foot on that side. His foot being not more than three inches from the ground, the horse, in the act of falling, will deliver him safe on terra firma, if he will only let it, whilst, by retaining his grasp of the handles, the rider at once balances himself on alighting, and saves the velocipede from falling. Some difficulty in remounting without help is sure to be experienced by a learner. For a month he must content himself with the assistance of the first post or gate or palings he sees by the wayside; but he will soon discard such assistance, and be able to vault on the saddle whilst his horse is in motion.
Good hard road is essential for velocipede-driving. In muddy or loose gravelly road, the work becomes proportionately laborious. But with good 'going ground,' it is difficult to convey how little labour is really required to maintain a high rate of speed - in fact, the great trouble with beginners is to get them to restrain the expenditure of muscular force. Velocipede-driving is, I believe from experience, most healthy and exhilarating, since it exercises all the muscles of the limbs in a manner much more uniform than would at first be credited, and certainly without undue strain on any part of the body. To the spectator, the velocipedist appears almost wholly to employ his legs, but in reality the muscles of the arms are in strong tension in the act of grasping the handles, so as to counteract the motion of the feet on the pedals, which motion would otherwise tend to sway the wheel from side to side. In fact, after a long journey, the driver will feel more fatigue in his arms than in his legs. Once mastered, the two-wheeled steed is a docile and tractable animal, equally sensitive to bit and bridle, and a sturdy friend to the traveller. For him the pike-men throw open their gates without asking for toll. He needs neither corn nor beans, nor hay nor straw, neither hostler nor stableman. His stable is a bit of the passage-wall, against which he reposes, without taking up any room, until his master needs him again - his only food, a pennyworth of neat's-foot oil per month.
Pierre Lallemant in 1866, demonstrating his pedal-cycle, which he patented in the USA, but developed in the workshop of Pierre Michaux [Wikipedia]There is a Japanese sauce surnamed the 'Maker to Eat.' It will have little charm to the palate of him who drives a bicycle; for, be he the veriest epicure of the epicurean sort, he will, after a three hours' run, possess an appetite to which the most homely bread and cheese appears dainty. At present, the bicycle is regarded, in England, very much in the light of a toy, and its practice as a pastime: not so in Paris and New York, where persons of all grades may be seen solemnly and seriously going to their daily business on two wheels.
Now that the supposition about the new velocipedes frightening horses has been proved to be groundless, there seems little reason to doubt they will become equally popular in this country; and that after the first 'rage' for the novelty has died away, the two-wheeled steed may drop into its proper place as a serviceable nag, that can do a great deal of work in a very little time, and, after the first cost, at a very inconsiderable expense."
James Starley was another pioneer bicycle manufacturer, whose eccentric tricycle was used to build the first electric vehicle, Gustav Trouvé's e-trike of 1881. [Wikipedia]Paul d'Orléans is the founder of TheVintagent.com. He is an author, photographer, filmmaker, museum curator, event organizer, and public speaker. Check out his Author Page, Instagram, and Facebook.
[Forward: in the book 'The Current' (2018 Gestalten), I stated in my introductory essay that 'Electricity is Modernity'. The scientific and technical process of harnessing electricity for human use defines the modern era, and has transformed our lives in ways we scarcely acknowledge today. We have become creatures seemingly independent of the sun, moon, and stars, or at least, the ability to abolish the night gave rise to such thinking, which increasingly looks like hubris. It's the use of electricity, not fire, that is the 'true Promethean moment', although our embrace of fire in the form of petroleum looks more like a Faustian bargain every day.
The history of electric vehicles is little discussed today, but goes back well into the 19th Century, paralleling developments in steam power for vehicles, and predating the use of petroleum to power engines. We all know the story of Benjamin Franklin and his experiments with kites in storms in the 1700s, but compared to steam (the first experiments date back thousands of years), electricity is a relatively new field. In this series, The Vintagent explores the roots and development of electric powered two-wheelers, as part of our celebration of e-Bikes on our web channel The Current.]
Benjamin Franklin's 'battery' of interconnected Leyden jars from 1769 - exactly 100 years before the electric motorcycle was proposed [Franklin Institute]The invention of electric vehicles was dependent on two technical advances in the 1800s: the battery and the electric motor. The term 'battery' was coined by Benjamin Franklin, to describe an array of interconnected, charged glass plates. The term was adopted to cover electricity generated through a chemical reaction (what we now think of as a battery): it was chemists who first developed a practical method of electrical generation. Allesandro Volta built the first 'wet cell' battery in 1800 - the Voltaic Pile - that used discs of copper and zinc sandwiched with cardboard soaked in brine. Volta used his own research and that of Luigi Galvani to design his battery: both their names are enshrined in our daily vernacular as volts and galvanism.
One of the first electric motors, built by Jedlik in Hungary in 1828 [Wikipedia]The creation of the battery as a stable supply of electric current led to a dramatic increase in research with electricity. By 1802 Humphrey Davy exhibited the first incandescent light (a thin platinum strip stretched between electric wires), and the first electric arc lamp in 1806. It's difficult today to imagine the impact of such inventions on the mindset of people in the day: no longer would our activities be limited to the cycles of nature - humans would soon dominate nature. Davy gave public lectures that spread a new ideology, a paradigm shift in how people saw their place in the world: "[Science] has bestowed on him powers which may almost be called creative; which have enabled him to modify and change the beings surrounding him, and by his experiments to interrogate nature with power, not simply as a scholar, passive and seeking only to understand her operations, but rather as a master, active with his own instruments." (from 'The Age of Wonder', Holmes 2008).
Fiat Lux! Humphry Davy demonstrates the electric arc lamp for members of the Royal Institution of London, with a charge crossing two carbon points, in 1809. The lower half of the image shows rows of large boxes - these are batteries installed in the basement of the Institution! A huge array was required to power a single arc lamp, as batteries were very weak in the early 1800s. [Wikipedia]Various types of batteries were developed in the early 1800s, and were usually messy affairs: open containers of acid with metals suspended in them to create stable chemical reactions and generate electricity. The rechargeable lead-acid battery, as used in just about every car and motorcycle until the 2000s, was invented in 1859 by Gustave Planté, while the first ‘dry cell’ batteries, as we use in portable electric tools, flashlights, and now vehicles, were invented in 1886 by Carl Gassner. Of course, invention and application are very different things, and it took yet more time to develop practical batteries of all types, and commercialize them. A battery small enough and strong enough to power a vehicle was not developed until the 1880s.
The turning point: Michaux's first commercially produced bicycle of 1868, which rapidly spread the joy of two wheels. [Wikipedia]The electric motor is a relatively recent invention, as the theory of electrons and magnets creating motion was first laid down in 1821 by Michael Faraday. The first proper electric motor, able to do real work, was developed by Thomas Davenport in 1834. Still, it wasn't until the 1870s that electric motors made any real impact on the world, in the form of trolleys. They were the first form of electricity to affect people's lives, as by the 1880s there were hundreds of trolleys transporting people in cities around the world, a decade before electric lights were adopted.
Louis-Guillame Perreaux's 1871 (June 15th) elegant patent drawing specifying steam power for his velocipede, using a tiny steam engine on a Michaux bicycle (the first commercially produced bicycle with pedals). While Perreaux first patented the idea of a motorcycle in 1868 (Dec 26), he did not specify the power source until this 1871 addition, specifying steam power for his velocipede. [Archives INPI]The concept of the electric motorcycle was first patented in France by three different people, two of them within days of each other: clearly, the idea had been discussed among peers. The invention of the electric motorcycle is directly related to the first commercial production of pedal bicycles in 1868. In a case of competing claimants, Pierre Michaux and his son Ernest, in company with Pierre Lallemont initially, built the first pedal-cycles in the early 1860s, by adding pedals to the front axle of a velocipede - the idea was apparently inspired by a pedal-powered grinding wheel. Lallemont took the idea to American in 1865, while the Michauxs worked with the Olivier brothers to commercially produce the first bicycles in 1868. But these are dry words: it's difficult to overstate the impact of these first bicycles on people's consciousness, as they were a hell of a lot of fun. Already on May 1st 1869, the English magazine Chamber's Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts published an essay on bicycling that's both rapturous and poetic:
"The slightly increased labour of climbing a hill is nothing to the zest imparted by a knowledge that there is sure to be a hill the other side to go down, and that is the most luxurious travelling that can be imagined. Descending an incline at full speed, balanced on a beautifully tempered steel spring that takes every jolt from the road - wheels spinning over the ground so lightly they scarce seem to touch it - the driver's legs rested comfortably on the cross-bar in front - shooting the hill at a speed of thirty or forty miles an hour - the sensation is only comparable to that of flying."
The idea of adding a motor to the bicycle was a natural follow-up, to perpetuate this amazing feeling: the exhilaration felt by all motorcyclists on an open road and a rising throttle. The idea for the electric motorcycle was first suggested (it seems) by the very fellow who first patented the concept of the motorcycle itself: Louis-Guillame Perreaux. There has long been a debate over who built the first motorcycle - Perreaux or Sylvester H. Roper (read our story about Roper here), but it seems today Roper built the earlier machine, while Perraux probably built his in 1870/'71, and patented his steam-cycle in 1871 (Roper never patented his motorcycle, but did ride it extensively). Of course, a credible claim can be made that the motorcycle concept dates back to 1818, as discussed in our post on the 'Vélocipédraisiavaporianna'.
Joseph Marie's patent drawing of April 28, 1869, that details an electric motor to power a "Vélocipède magnéto-électrique." This is probably the oldest patent in the world for an engine other than steam to power a motorcycles, according to Steeve Gallizia, an archivist at INPI (Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle) in France. Many thanks to Steeve for his patent research! [Archives INPI]Perreaux's first patent for a motorcycle is from Dec. 26 1868, but he did not specify the type of motor to be attached to his bicycle. The path was not yet clear: electric and steam were the rivals, as it would be 8 years before a petrol engine was built by Nikolaus Otto (although the internal combustion engine was invented back in 1807 by Nicéphore Niépce, but used powdered moss for fuel!). Small electric and steam engines were both still under development, but steam was decades ahead in actual use, so it was natural the first functional motorcycle was steam powered. Still, on April 28th 1869, Joseph Marie filed the first known patent (#85499) for a Vélocipède magnéto-électrique - an electric motorcycle. Mere days later (May 6 1869), Emile-Joseph Delaurier and Jules Morin patented their machine dite vélocipède électrique. Perreaux didn't patent his steam velocipede until June 15th 1871, as an addition to his original 1868 patent. It isn't known if Perreaux, Marie, or Delaurier/Morin actually constructed these engines and built electric motorcycles, or merely patented the concept. But, the concept is there, and correct, although batteries with strength enough to move a human were cumbersome, and better suited to 3- or 4-wheelers at the time.
Gustave Trouvé's 1881 electric tricycle, the first electric vehicle demonstrated to the world, on April 19th, using a Starley tricycle with Trouvé's own batteries and electric motor attached. The future had arrived. [from Physique et Chimie Popularies, Vol. 2: 1881-83 (Alexix Clerc, 1883)]The first successful demonstration of an electric vehicle was a tricycle built by Gustave Trouvé, demonstrated on April 19, 1881 on the Rue Valois in Paris. Trouvé used a Starley eccentric tricycle chassis, and attached rechargeable batteries of his own design with an electric motor: an assistant drove the first electric vehicle in the world before an appreciative crowd. He was unable to patent his design, as the concept of such a vehicle had already been patented (a Humber trike with a steam engine). Regardless, Trouvé patented 300 other ideas, and swapped the very electric battery/motor combo from the trike into a small boat, and invented the outboard motor! The list of his electric inventions is enormous, from sewing machines and dental drills to wearable luminescent body art and portable UV lights for treating skin diseases. (There's a great book on Trouvé you can find here.) Trouvé is one of those 'lost' inventors only recently rediscovered, whose impact on a dozen fields altered the human experience.
Gustave Trouvé's luminescent dance costume from the 1880s
In the midst of the worst motorcycle market in German history, the NSU factory opted to go big with a remarkable multi-bike assault on the World Speed Record on the Bonneville Salt Flats, taking on six capacity classes: 50cc, 100cc, 125cc, 250cc, 350cc, and 500cc. In 1956 the factory shipped over a quiver of streamliners to Utah, arriving on July 25th, and nothing was left to chance; NSU's Chairman Dr. G.S. von Heydenkampf and Technical Director Viktor Frankenberger were on hand to oversee the mechanics, technicians, and officials (including Piet Nortier, from the F.I.M., in charge of timing). A traveling machine shop had also been shipped from Germany, with enough spares and equipment to deal with any mechanical emergency.
Wilhelm Herz with the Delphin III streamliner before the record attempts, with a clean machine. The black line on the salt is painted by a truck afresh every year: the distance to those mountains in the background is 25 miles [Cycle magazine]NSU had developed a devastatingly successful range of 250cc and 125cc racers in the mid-1950s, winning 5 World Championships in a 3-year span from 1953-55, the last after the factory had officially withdrawn from Grand Prix racing. That year, H.P. 'Happy' Mueller won the 1955 title on a production-racing Sportmax, the first privateer to win a World Championship (at age 46). Two years after they bowed out of racing, NSU spent a considerable sum developing six streamliners of truly innovative configuration, using a 'hammock' riding position for the rider, which kept their height, and thus their frontal area, extremely low. As well, these long, triangular-bodied missiles handled surprisingly well, as proven to the press during the run-up to the record attempts. Their engines were all from NSU's Grand Prix racers, sophisticated Rennfoxes and Rennmaxes (the blueprints of which Soichiro Honda photographed the year prior on a factory tour of Europe), and their almighty supercharged vertical twins. But there was still Nature to contend with at Bonneville, in the form of the wind.
HP 'Happy' Müller pilots the 100cc Baumm II streamliner to 150.3mph - the two small bumps ahead of the windscreen are for his knees! He is prone in his 'hammock' seat, and steers the handlebars beneath his knees. Note the solid disc wheels, and the motor behind (not beneath) the rider, which set the pattern for all future streamliners [Cycle magazine]Road-racer H.P. Mueller piloted the 3 smaller-capacity streamliners, finding his runs on the salt relatively easy going, and taking 121.7mph in the 50cc machine, 138.0mph in the 100cc bike, and 150.3mph with the 125cc, which also overtook the records for 175cc and 250cc categories. Wilhelm Herz, heir apparent to Ernst Henne as Germany's (and the world's) fastest man on two wheels, was in the saddle for the 350cc category, and made 189.5mph on a 1-mile flying start run on the smaller of the blown parallel twins.
Gustav Adolph Baum shows off the construction of the 50cc NSU streamliner, with its 'hammock' seating, in a publicity shot from 1956. For more info, read the Comments section below! [Hockenheim Museum Archive]But Herz didn't have an easy time with his record-breaking, as a few days previously he'd been pushed off-course by a gust of wind, hammered a timing light, and tore a gash in the nose of the Delphin III (named for the sleek shape of the streamlined body). Earlier, while testing the 250cc 'hammock' streamliner, the motorcycle went out of control at 195mph (note that it was faster than the 350cc streamliner) and flipped over, which ended the 250cc record attempts for this session. This was truly unfortunate, as NSU had their greatest technical and racing successes in the 250cc class, with Werner Haas winning 5 of the 7 races counting towards the World Championship in 1954, and his team-mate Rupert Hollaus winning another with the gorgeous Rennmax racers.
The 500cc Kompressor showing its unique chassis for record-breaking, with hydraulic damping front and rear, and brakes! The engine's architecture is clear, with shaft-and-bevel drive for each camshaft, and the supercharger above the gearbox [Cycle magazine]The Rennmax is a machine for the ages, a perfected design matching the technical brilliance of NSU's motor and chassis, with achingly beautiful hand-beaten alloy bodywork. NSU quit Grand Prix racing because of the expense of development and fielding a team: the general turndown in the European motorcycle market in the mid-1950s saw NSU, Gilera, DKW, Moto Guzzi, etc, all drop out of the GP scene, leaving MV Agusta an open field for several years, until Mr Honda got involved and won every capacity class, and Yamaha finished the Japanese takeover with inexpensive two-strokes overwhelming sophisticated multi-cylinder four-strokes.
Pushing the Delphin III to the start line on one of its record runs - note the holes for Hertz' legs - no outrigger wheels [Cycle magazine]On August 4th 1956, ten days into NSU's record-setting spree, the wind conditions had calmed down, and at 6am, Herz leaped from the starting line under full throttle 'with salt spewing from a wildly spinning rear wheel', according to Cycle magazine. He made 211.4mph on his first run, and broke the previous record by 26mph! The record had been held only a year, as on July 2nd 1955, Russell Wright on a Vincent Black Lightning reached 185mph on the Tram Road at Swannanoa, Christchurch, New Zealand. Strangely, Vincent and NSU were financially connected, as from 1954, Vincents sold lightweight NSUs under license in an attempt to stay afloat. Vincent was already out of business by 1956, and NSU, despite its glorious achievements, was absorbed into Auto Union in 1962.
The primary drive side of the NSU 500cc twin, showing the full chassis [Cycle magazine]NSU's 500cc (and 350cc) engine used at Bonneville is a work of art, and had already taken the World Speed Record in 1951 on the Munich-Ingolstadt autobahn. For the 1956 Bonneville attempt, a new, longer and lower frame was built, as seen in these photos, as well as the 'dolphin' enclosed fairing, making the total length 3.7 meters. Girder forks with hydraulic dampers were used up front, and hydraulic plungers at the rear. The unit-construction motor is an inclined vertical twin with shaft-and-bevel driven double overhead cams, with peak revs of 8000rpm. Ignition is by forward-mounted magneto, the supercharger sits atop the gearbox, and is fed by a single (very large) Amal-Fischer TT carb. The crankcases and covers are all magnesium.
A shot of the Grand Prix blown 500cc racer in road-race form [Paul d'Orléans]NSU's 500cc DOHC twin-cylinder engine had a disadvantage in GP racing as it's a heavy lump, and while the power was excellent, the much lighter Moto Guzzi singles and Gilera Fours meant tough competition on the track. Weight isn't an issue during a speed record though, as it only slows acceleration, and doesn't affect top speed. Thus the Delphin III was fully equipped with both front and rear brakes, and lead blocks were even hung on the frame to combat high-speed lift, and keep the front wheel on the salt at 200mph.
Herz in the Delphin III after his crash - note the gash in the nose [Cycle magazine]The smaller NSU streamliners (250cc and below) all used the ingenious 'flying hammock' seating position, in which the rider sits with legs outstretched, to make an especially low motorcycle with minimal frontal area for the best wind-cheating layout. A Cycle magazine correspondent (Ron Britzke) made note of the superior handling and aerodynamics of these smaller machines, and reckoned that the 'dolphin' fairing had seen its limit, while the potential of the 'deck chair' design 'has apparently just been tapped'. How right he proved to be, as future streamliners abandoned the biomorphic tadpole shape popular from the 1930s, and moved toward needle-like missiles with minimal frontal area, and riders feet-first in the cockpit.
The cockpit of the Delphin III with a traditional rider-on-top position, with the fuel tank shown, and the rev-counter [Cycle magazine]NSU had proved their point: they built the fastest motorcycles in the world in 5 categories. But the German motorcycle market was in dire straits in 1956, as the economy as a whole ramped up, and riders could afford the comfort of four wheels. By the early 1960s, most German bike manufacturers were out of business, regardless the country was once home to the largest motorcycle factories in the world (DKW and NSU). But Germany was late in making the transition from motorcycle-as-transport to motorcycle-as-leisure object (which happened in the US in the 1920s), and the 1950s was one of the many great die-off periods in the history of motorcycling, much like 1914-18 in the USA (when hundreds of manufacturers disappeared), and 1930 everywhere else. Two wheels has always been a tough business, and continues to be one today, but we honor the magnificent deeds of those who gave their all to keep worthy manufacturers alive.
A frontal shot of NSU's 500cc machine that took the absolute World Speed Record for motorcycles in 1956 [Cycle magazine]NSU's American importers Butler&Smith (east coast) and Flanders (west coast) boast of breaking the 200mph barrier. Note that the 250cc class record is the same as the 125-175cc record, as it was taken with the same 125cc machine! [Hockenheim Museum Archive]
Paul d'Orléans is the founder of TheVintagent.com. He is an author, photographer, filmmaker, museum curator, event organizer, and public speaker. Check out his Author Page, Instagram, and Facebook.
They were the 'most photographed women of the War' - that war being WW1 - which is a pretty unlikely lot for a couple of nurses. But Mairi Chisholm and Elsie Knocker were a pretty unlikely pair, who spent the War a mere 100 yards from the front line of Ypres ('Wipers' in Tommy slang), in a makeshift basement hospital treating wounded soldiers - British, Belgian, and German alike. Their bravery, and perhaps love of danger, earned both women the highest commendations of that conflict, from Belgian and British authorities. and an awful lot of press in the day. They're nearly forgotten now, but in the 'Teens, Mairi and Elsie were household conversation topics as incredibly brave and 'plucky' women in the Victorian era, before women even had the right to vote. And the path that led to their involvement in that dreadful conflict was a mutual love of motorcycles.
Elsie Knocker with her Chater-Lea v-twin sidecar outfit, with an unknown passenger in the sidecar.
Elsie Knocker was born Elizabeth Shapter (July 29 1884 - Apr 26 1978) in Exeter, was orphaned by age 6 (her mother died when she was 4, her father at 6, from tuberculosis), and adopted by Emily and Lewis Upcott, a teacher at Marlborough College. The Upcotts had the means to send Elsie to study at Chatéau Lutry in Switzerland, and she later trained as a nurse at the Children's Hip Hospital in Sevenoaks. She married Leslie Duke Knocker in 1906, and they had a son, Kenneth, but divorced soon after. She then earned her living as a midwife, and to save face during Victorian social strictures, invented the story that she was widowed when her husband died in Java.
Elsie Knocker with her Douglas Ladies' Model flat twin ca.1912, and her dashing leather Dunhill outfit!
She became a passionate motorcyclist, and wore very stylish outfits while riding, notably a dark green leather skirt and long leather coat, which was cinched at the waist to "keep it all together" - the outfit was designed by Alfred Dunhill Ltd! She owned various motorcycles, including a Scott two-stroke, a Douglas flat twin, and a Chater-Lea with sidecar, which she took to Belgium during the War. She earned the nickname 'Gypsy' as a member of the Gypsy Motorcycle Club, and because she loved the open road.
Mairi Chisholm with her Douglas flat-twin, which she maintained herself, and brought with her to Belgium [Imperial War Museum]Mairi Lembert Gooden-Chisholm was 12 years younger than her friend Elsie, being born on Feb 26 1896 (died Aug 22 1981), in Nairn, Scotland, to a wealthy family who owned a plantation in Trinidad. The family moved to Dorset when she was young, where Mairi's older brother (Uailean) competed in rallies and speed trials aboard his 425cc Royal Enfield single. Her father, no doubt after much entreating, bought her a Douglas flat twin, which she soon learned to both ride and strip down/repair completely. She was 18 years old and loved riding her Douglas around Dorset roads, which is where she met Elsie Knocker in 1912, also motorcycle mounted and enjoying the countryside, even though Knocker was by then 30 years old. The pair became close friends and riding companions, and competed in motorcycle (and sidecar) trials together.
Elsie Knocker (l) and Mairie Chisholm in a car during the War [Imperial War Museum]When War was declared in 1914, Knocker felt the call of duty, and convinced Chisholm to move with her to London and become despatch riders for the Women's Emergency Corps. Chisholm rode her Douglas to London, and her riding skill as a courier negotiating London traffic caught the eye of Dr. Hector Munro, who set up a Flying Ambulance Corps to help Belgians after the German army invaded and brutalized that supposedly neutral country. Chisholm described her meeting Dr. Munro in a 1976 interview, "He was deeply impressed with my ability to ride through traffic. He traced me to the Women's Emergency Corps, and said, 'Would you like to go to Flanders', and I said 'Yes I'd love to!'
Elsie Knocker (l), Dr Hector Munro (in sidecar), and Mairi Chisolm, likely during a publicity shoot before leaving for Belgium in 1914
Chisholm and Elsie Knocker had to apply for Dr Munro's Flying Ambulance Corps, and beat out 200 other applicants. Knocker was a natural, both as a nurse, and because she was an excellent mechanic (and driver), and spoke both German and French fluently, from her Swiss schooling. Lady Dorothie Fielding and May Sinclair were also included in Munro's special unit, with all women acting as nurse/ambulance drivers, and they all landed at Ostend in September 1914. The team initially set up camp at Ghent, but by October they'd moved to Furnesin, near Dunkirk, ferrying wounded soldiers to the hospital who'd been carried from the Front. They soon realized they'd save a lot more lives if they were actually at the Front, regardless the horrors they'd already witnessed. "No one can understand, unless one has seen the rows of dead men laid out. One sees men with their jaws blown off, arms and legs mutilated" - Chisholm.
December 1914, Mairi Chisholm's photo of a fallen soldier near Ypres [Imperial War Museum]In November 1914, Chisholm and Knocker left Dr Munro's Corps and set up a small wound-dressing hospital in the town of Pervyse, near Ypres, in the basement of a destroyed house, a mere hundred yards from the Front lines. They called it the 'British First Aid Post', and it was tiny, with a 6' ceiling, and the women slept on straw, leaving the only (rock hard) bed for the wounded. The local water was so contaminated they had to import barrels of water from England, could eat only canned foods, and the pressures of fighting meant most nights they worked till 3:30, and started again at 5:30. They made hot soup and cocoa for the soldiers, which they delivered every morning, but when things got hairy the women couldn't even bathe; Elsie had to have her vest cut away from her skin after not removing her clothing for 3 weeks in one stretch!
Mairi and Elsie outside their station, 'Pervyse Cottage'
This was their life for an incredible 3 1/2 years; treating the wounded as totally free agents, who had to raise their own funds at first. Luckily, they had a camera, and began photographing the front, which secured them space in British newspapers, and the fame of these women motorcyclists began to grow, and funds to flow. When they needed a bullet-proof door for their clinic, it was supplied by Harrod's! They returned occasionally to London on fundraising tours, riding a sidecar outfit and collecting money, knitted socks and hats for the soldiers, as well as tobacco and cigarettes. The press loved them; 'Sandbags Instead of Handbags!' proclaimed one British paper.
Darlings of the press, the women's efforts no doubt brought many other women to volunteer in the War
Their proximity to a local Belgian garrison eventually gained them an official attachment to the Belgian military. Word of their bravery and their work saving soldiers under incredibly difficult conditions spread far and wide. Fellow Flying Ambulance Corps member May Sinclair described Knocker as "having an irresistible inclination towards the greatest possible danger." Many times the women crossed the front lines to save fallen soldiers, sometimes carrying them on their backs through the mud, and under fire, including one German pilot who'd been shot down and wounded in No Man's Land. For that, they were awarded the British Military Medal and were made Officers of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, and awarded the Order of Léopold II, Knights Cross. Yet more awards and honors followed, including the Croix de Guerre, which meant the ladies had to be saluted by all the soldiers, which they found most amusing.
Elsie Knocker with the Belgian soldier she married, Baron Harold de T'Serclaes, in Pervyse, 1916 [Imperial War Museum]In January 1916, Knocker had a whirlwind romance with Baron Harold de T'Serclaes of the Belgian Flying Corps, and was soon married. "So much of me went into my work that I suppose I was easily swept along on a tide of glamour and welcome frivolity. Perhaps I had a desire just to drift for once, not to struggle ...and after 15 months risking my life at the Front, marriage seemed a comparatively small risk to take." Because of the War, the two saw little of each other. That year Chisholm became engaged to a Royal Navy Air pilot, who was soon killed in his plane. In March 1918, the women were both wounded in a German bombing raid and arsenic gas attack, and taken back to England. It was the end of their Belgian adventure; both women joined the Women's Royal Air Force, and Chisholm got engaged to an RAF 2nd Lieutenant (Wm Thomas James Hall), but soon called it off.
The women driving a Wolseley Ambulance in Belgum
After the War, the Belgian Baron discovered that his wife Elsie Knocker was not a widow, but a divorcée, and the Catholic church forced an annulment of their marriage. Read into it what you will, but apparently that was the breaking point of her friendship with Mairi Chisholm. Chisholm took up auto racing after the War, but her injuries (from the gas attack and septicaemia) had weakened her heart, and doctor advised her to take it easy. She spent the rest of her days on the estate of her childhood friend May Davidson, and moved with her to Jersey in the 1930s, and never married (a man). Elsie Knocker was a senior officer in the WAAF during WW2, and earned distinction, but lost her son in the RAF in 1942, and left the military to care for her elderly foster-father. She lived the rest of her life in Ashtead, Surrey, and was notorious for being "flamboyantly dressed with large earrings and a voluminous dark coat!"
Elsie Knocker and Mairi Chisholm in a trench on the Front, near Ypres, 1916 [Imperial War Museum]With such widespread acclaim and press attention, it was inevitable the women told their stories, and several books exist on their Belgian experiences. In 1916, Geraldine Mitton worked with Elsie and Mairi to write a book from their letters and notes while still at the front, 'The Cellar-House of Pervyse', which is available in reprint here (or original edition here), and more recently, Dr. Diane Atkinson wrote 'Elsie and Mairi Go To War' (2009), which is available here. They're two women motorcyclists who are definitely worth investigating!
You’d be forgiven thinking Honda built the first production 4-cylinder motorcycle in 1968, when they introduced the CB750 and changed motorcycling forever. Nobody had previously built an inexpensive, reliable, high-performance ‘four’ in history; it was a magic trifecta, but in truth, Honda had plenty of four-pots to study, and copy, when designing the immortal CB line. From the earliest days of the motorcycle (and auto) industry, it was understood that more cylinders for a given engine capacity meant higher rpms with less stress, and more horsepower with smoother running, at the expense of increased complication and production costs. The motorcycle press from the ‘Noughts onward dreamed of fours as the ‘ideal’ machine, an exciting vision of the future, which indeed became a reality by the 1970s.
The first known four-cylinder motorcycle was this remarkable watercooled flat four built by Col. Capel Holden in 1899: an example currently lives in the London Science Museum archives [Hockenheim Museum Archive]The first four-cylinder gasoline-powered motorcycle was manufactured in Britain between 1899 and 1902, by Colonel Capel Holden, who’d built his first 4-cylinder steam motorcycle in 1895. The Holden was a water-cooled flat four of 1100cc, and a few examples still exist, notably in the London Science Museum. Like most 4-cylinder motorcycle dreamer/designers, Holden went on to do amazing things, like designing the Brooklands race track in 1906. The Belgian Fabrique Nationale (F-N, still an arms manufacturer) claimed the next viable, serially built 4-cylinder in 1904: it was truly the world’s first production inline four, which laid the pattern of most fours until the 1920s. The FN motor was designed by Paul Kelecom with a 350cc capacity, ‘atmospheric’ inlet valves over the exhaust valves, a single-speed shaft drive to the rear wheel, and a top speed of 40mph. By 1908 there were FN dealers in the USA, and local factories thought they could do better.
A 1905 FN, one of their earliest machines from the Belgian arms manufacturer [Hockenheim Museum Archive]The first to try was the Pierce Motorcycle Co, founded by Percy Pierce, son of the Pierce automobile’s founder George N. Pierce. In the grand American tradition, Percy beefed up the FN motor to 707cc, added a positively-operated inlet valve for hot performance, and designed a radical frame of very large tubing to hold the gas and suspend the motor. The Pierce 4 of 1909 was America’s first 4-cylinder motorcycle, and was a hot potato with a 60mph top speed. Today they’re at the top of most collectors’ list, not simply for being first, but for their dramatic style, and the Pierce auto connection.
A Pierce four-cylinder in 1911, embarking on a 5-day endurance ride in San Francisco, which he won with a total of 1770 miles ridden. The extra-large acetylene headlamp was for night riding sections, and not a Pierce accessory [The Vintagent Library]While the Pierce was the bedrock of American fours, it was William Henderson who established their true dynasty. Henderson was the grandson of the Winton automobile family, and son of the Thomas Henderson, Vice-President of Winton. Young William dreamed of two wheels though, and ran dozens of drawings for a new four-cylinder motorcycle past his father for approval. Years of back-and-forth ended with a blueprint Dad couldn’t criticize, which became the prototype Henderson Four in 1911. Production by the new Henderson Motorcycle Co began in 1912, and was an immediate international news item, as Charles Stearns Clancy set forth on his Henderson to become the first motorcyclist to circle the globe.
A 1918 Henderson Four, still with extra-long wheelbase, and sophisticated construction [National Archives]While the Henderson was known as the ‘Deusenberg of Motorcycles’ for its elegance and beautiful finish, money troubles forced Henderson to sell his design to Ignaz Schwinn in 1917, and the Excelsior-Henderson 4 was born, living through 1930. Henderson couldn’t be suppressed, and founded the Ace Motor Co in 1919, with a wholly new design that didn’t infringe on any previous patents. The new Ace Four was the fastest production motorcycle in the world, and a specially-tuned Ace racer, the XP-4, was timed at 129mph in 1923. Like most 4-cylinder motorcycle manufacturers, Ace struggled financially, as the magic trifecta – speed, reliability, and low price – seemed impossible for ‘fours’. Ace was sold to Indian in 1927, and the Indian Four is perhaps the best known American 4-cylinder motorcycle, produced from 1928 – 1941, when Briggs Weaver’s deep-skirted streamline design was the last American four-cylinder motorcycle built, until the Motus MST of 2014.
This 1909 Laurin et Klement four-cylinder used FN practice in a novel chassis [Hockenheim Museum Archive]Europe was another matter entirely, and a host of manufacturers experimented with four-cylinder motors in line with the frame, across the frame, as vee-fours, flat fours, square fours, opposed double-twins, and inlet-over-exhaust, sidevalve, overhead valve, overhead camshaft, double overhead camshaft, and supercharged versions of nearly all the above! Britain kept a robust four-cylinder industry, with Matchless producing the futuristic, narrow-angle OHC v-4 Silver Arrow, and Ariel producing the Square Four from 1931 – 1959, initially in OHC form, then pushrod from 1933.
The 1928 Brough Superior Four with inline sidevalve engine built by Motosacoche under the direction of Bert LeVack [Hockenheim Museum Archive]The ‘Rolls Royce of Motorcycles’, Brough Superior, built a sidevalve v-4, an inline air-cooled 4, a water-cooled inline 4 (using a hotrod Austin 7 engine, with twin rear wheels!), and a flat opposed double-twin called the Dream…all from a company that produced only 3000 motorcycles from 1919-1940. Their only 'production' four, the BS4 with Austin engine, was a luxury machine par excellence, with peerless style and road manners, and a reverse gear inherited from its Austin heritage, which proved useful when hauling a sidecar, as most did. Not all, though, and journalist Hubert Chantry was well-known for riding his 3-wheel Brough around Picadilly Circus in London, backwards! His machine was unearthed a few years ago in appalling condition, sold at Bonhams for $490k, and is now once again a magnificent runner.
The 1930 Brough Superior-Austin BS4, as road tested on The Vintagent - read it here [Paul d'Orléans]While German motorcycles are known mostly for BMW today, from the 1900s onwards hundreds of small and a few large manufacturers filled their roads with interesting machines. BMW didn’t produce a four until 1982 (the K100 with laid-down inline motor), but rival Zundapp built a flat four, the K800, from 1933-44, which became the only 4-cylinder military motorcycle in WW2, most of which were snagged by officers for their personal use. Zundapp had worked with Ferdinand Porsche to build the Auto fur Jederman – the first Volkswagen – in 1931.
The 1928 Windhoff oil-cooled, overhead camshaft Four, as road tested by The Vintagent - read it here [Paul d'Orléans]A little-known but extremely collectible marque, Windhoff, produced an overhead-camshaft, oil-cooled inline 4 in 1928, with futuristic lines, and no frame per se. Everything bolted to its massive, finned engine casting – the steering head and forks up front, with four parallel steel tubes inserted straight rearward for the shaft drive and rear wheel. This dramatic machine was designed by Ing. Dauben, who parlayed his experience into a job at Mercedes-Benz, helping to design the all-conquering W194-196 ‘Silver Arrow’ racers. Read our Road Test of a Windhoff here.
The magnificent Gilera Quattro Grand Prix racer that took 6 World Championships, adapted from a design of 1924 by OPRA [Hockenheim Museum Archive]It was the Italians who truly dominated four-cylinder motorcycle design before the 1960s. Their passion for engineering and high performance meant literally dozens of small manufacturers tried their hand at every conceivable arrangement of cylinders, and a rather thick book – ‘Pluricilindriche’ by Ing. Stefano Milani – documents the bewildering variety of Italian one-offs and small batch producers. The most fruitful line emerged from the pen of Piero Remor, who designed a prototype across-the-frame 500cc OHV four in 1923 with Carlo Gianini, which soon became an OHC motor, then a DOHC motor by 1926. Teaming up with Count Giovani Bonmartini for financing, they formed the OPRA research institute, and it was hoped to license this remarkable design to other manufacturers, which was by 1927 water-cooled and producing 32hp at 6000rpm. It was in fact the most advanced, sophisticated, elegant, and best-performing motorcycle engine in the world, but compared to, say, the Henderson four, it required absolutely precise engineering tolerances to manufacture.
The 1937 supercharged version of the Gilera Rondine, developed by CNA, and designed by Piero Remor, the father of the Italian racing DOHC fours of Gilera and MV Agusta [Paul d'Orléans]There were no takers for this remarkable motor, so Count Bonmartini absorbed OPRA into his CNA aircraft manufacturing business, and stole Carlo Gianini to design his planes. Remor kept his faith in motorcycles, and continued to develop his motor using a built-in supercharger. His first public demonstration of the blown machine was a resounding win in the 1935 Tripoli GP, by which time the engine produced 87hp at 9000rpm. Nicknamed the ‘Rondine’ (Swallow), it soon proved itself the fastest motorcycle in the world, taking the World Motorcycle Speed Record at 152mph in 1937.
What the Gilera Quattro led to: the MV Agusta 750 Monza of 1974, a superb mix of engineering and design, and surely one of the most beautiful motorcycles of all time [Hockenheim Museum Archive]The World Record caught the industry’s attention, and finally Gilera purchased the Rondine design, and brought Piero Remor on board. The Gilera Rondine soon upped the speed record to over 170mph with a little streamlining, and began sweeping the fastest GP circuits like Monza, until WW2 intervened. Postwar, the Gilera 4, now without watercooling or a supercharger, but still under the wing of Remor, won 6 Grand Prix World Championships between 1950-56, when Gilera, along with BMW, NSU, Bianchi, Mondial, DKW, etc, withdrew from Grand Prix racing due to the increasing expense, and worsening motorcycle sales in Europe.
Hondas before the CB750: the 1964 RC164 four-cylinder 500cc racer that dominated Grand Prix racing. Honda's first four-cylinder racer, a shaft-and-bevel 250cc design raced at Mt. Asama, was raced in 1959, but soon discarded for and improved version [Paul d'Orléans]Count Domenico Agusta, head of the immortal MV Agusta manufacture of helicopters, boats, and motorcycles, initially agreed to join the exodus from GP racing, but had recently hired Remor away from Gilera to design a new DOHC 4 cylinder racer. Agusta saw little competition for his new machine, and Remor’s new MV Agusta 4GP racer then proceeded to win the next 17 Grand Prix World Championships! It was redesigned into a series of very expensive touring roadsters from 1966 onwards, and was the only DOHC production 4 for 12 years, until Kawasaki revealed the Z1 in 1972. By then, a four-cylinder motorcycle was a common sight on America’s roads, and the hundreds of thousands of CB750s, Z1s, Gold Wings, CB500s, etc seemed to have obliterated the very long history of the world’s Fours from our collective memory. But for 70 years, they remained an elusive dream, and a luxury too few riders could afford.
The amazing Puch V-4 of 1938, the subject of a future road test on The Vintagent [Paul d'Orléans]In 1928, Georges Roy built a prototype Majestic with a Cleveland four-cylinder motor. It was the only Majestic built with a four-cylinder motor: for a road test of a Majestic by The Vintagent, read here. [Hockenheim Museum Archive]
Paul d'Orléans is the founder of TheVintagent.com. He is an author, photographer, filmmaker, museum curator, event organizer, and public speaker. Check out his Author Page, Instagram, and Facebook.
Back in LA / Waiting for the sun to shine / Back in LA / Working on another line
- BB King, 'Back in LA'
Marty Dickerson's 'Blue Bike' at El Mirage
Los Angeles is almost like my second city. I came here first in 1968, when I was only 23 and sweet-talked my way into a job on Cycle World magazine. I rode the then-new 750cc Norton Commando on the Angeles Crest Highway, saw legendary hard-man Gary Nixon win the AMA championship on a 500cc Triumph on the Ascot half-mile dirt track, and Top Fuel drag cars tyre-smoke to 230mph in six seconds.
This time I’m in the custom and apparel shop of Deus Ex Machina on Venice Boulevard to meet James Salter, 40-ish music producer and secretary of the Southern California Vincent Owners’ Club. James is kindly loaning us a Dodge van of early nineties vintage as our LA workhorse and is part of the crew to shoot some key sequences of the forthcoming documentary, SpeedisExpensive. In the past four years, this film has tracked down and interviewed the remaining 16 men and women who built and designed the ground-breaking motorcycles in Stevenage, and secured the last major interview with one-time Vincent apprentice, the late John Surtees. The documentary promises to tell the story of Vincent and his motorcycles as never before. We’re here to meet some key people in the Vincent story from California. Also along with me is:
David Lancaster, SpeedisExpensive director and co-producer: Writer, documentary maker, Vincent owner and Vintagent contributor for some years
Steve Read, director of photography: co-director of the award-winning music bio-pic Gary Numan: Android in La La Land and director of photography on the recent BBC series on the summer of love, and Elvis’s Las Vegas years.
Philip Vincent-Day, Associate Producer: the grandson of designer Philip Vincent himself and custodian of the Vincent family archive.
Jay Leno and Phil Vincent-Day browse a selection of the Vincent family archive
James and I drive to Los Angeles airport to meet these three incoming Brits and assume that we’ll head to our Airbnb base in Pasadena. But James has other plans. "We’re going to Richard Asprey’s house in Manhattan Beach," he announces. "He’d like to meet you." Richard is a Brit who has worked in the insurance business in the USA for several years, and has enormous energy for life and motorcycles. He rode a 1915 500cc Norton for 3900 miles, from Atlantic City to San Diego in 16 days on the 2016 Cannonball Rally - an average of 245 miles a day. And he did this year’s cross-country run, from Portland to Portland, again on a single-pot Norton.
Richard Asprey in the 2016 Motorcycle Cannonball Endurance Run on his 1915 Norton 16H [from the MotoTintype project of Paul d'Orléans and Susan McLaughlin]He also owns several Vincents, and tells young Phil why his grandad’s bikes were so exceptional. "It’s the metallurgy," he says. "The fact that a Vincent engine seals itself when it gets warm, when everyone else was making motorcycles that leaked everywhere. The engineering is beautiful, and the reliability is way superior compared to any other older motorcycle I’ve got. You never feel that you’re going to break it."
He and Philip, who is making his first visit to the USA, strike up a good rapport. So much so that after Richard pops open the red wine, Philip stays on for the night while the rest of us head for Pasadena.
WEDNESDAY
Sometimes I feel like my only friend / Is the city I live in / The city of Angels - Red Hot Chili Peppers, 'Under the Bridge'
We’re driving down a road in Burbank when we see a vintage motorcycle coming towards us. It’s low and has a handlebar like an old-time delivery bicycle, with the grips pointing back towards the rider. What is it, and what is such a hard-to-handle vehicle doing in the LA traffic? "It’s Jay!" someone says. Jay Leno has invited us to see him at the warehouse where he keeps his well-used collection of cars and bikes and films his TV and web-based shows called, appropriately, Jay Leno’s Garage.
Jay Leno in his garage, with Marty Dickerson's Blue Bike
When Philip Vincent launched the Series B Rapide in 1946, other English factories were making 500cc parallel twins that jangled and wheezed at 85mph, while the Rapide, even on the feeble 72-octane fuel of the day, would romp by at 110mph. Even by the early 1970s, the tuned Black Shadow version was as quick as any other standard bike on the road [and was the fastest production motorcycle in the world until the Kawasaki Z-1 of 1973 - pd'o].
Jay is amusing on how he bought his first Vincent: "The guy selling it said, 'I can’t let you ride it by yourself, but I can take you on the back.' But since he’s trying to sell the bike he’s going as fast as he possibly can. I’m like, should I hold on to this guy? We’re hitting bumps but he says, 'It’ll do a hundred!' We’re in LA traffic and I say, 'Just stop now and I’ll buy it!' So that’s what I did and I’ve had it all these years."
Another shot of the Blue Bike, in good company with Jay Leno's Vincents
What attracted him to the marque? "It was the fact that it was a true 100mph motorcycle," he says. "100mph doesn’t sound like much now, but back in the day most vehicles would go 80, 90, 91, and then you’re out of road. The Vincent could do it quite easily. The stories you’d read about somebody racing a Harley or an Indian, and then the Vincent guy would just click into fourth gear and pull away… All those sort of tales made it a very exciting vehicle."
One of the most famous Vincents has been delivered to Jay’s garage, courtesy of its owner Richard Fitzpatrick in Texas. This is Marty Dickerson’s Blue Bike, on which he set a Class C record for lightly modified machines running on pump fuel of 129mph in 1951. In 1953, still on pump gasoline, he raised this to 147.85mph. We’ll meet the Blue Bike again tomorrow.
THURSDAY
Waiting by the side of the road / For day to break so we could go / Down into Los Angeles / With dirty hands and worn out knees - Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, 'Crawling Back to You'
We’re going out to the desert. A visit to the desert is always a wondrous experience for the British, because we don’t have landscape like this in our damp little island. El Mirage dry lake bed, 2800 feet up in the high Mojave, is Los Angeles’ mini-Bonneville Salt Flats; it’s here that the Blue Bike will be reunited with Marty, who is now 92, for the first time in many years. Our director David has met Marty several times before; even riding with him in France in the early 80s, on Vincents. Marty bought the Blue Bike as a Series B Rapide when he was 22, in 1948, and soon modified it for Bonneville runs. It was 20 years before his 147mph mark was broken, and it took a Yoshimura Kawasaki Z1 to do it.
Philip Vincent-Day chats with Marty Dickerson, reunited with his Blue Bike at El Mirage
Around 1950 Marty had the motorcyclist’s dream job - he was paid to go street racing. Vincent dealer Mickey Martin funded Marty to take the Rapide through the south-western states of America to tempt Harley-Davidson and Indian riders to challenge him to drag races on public roads, often at night, to get the Vincent talked about. The suckers had no idea what an engineering advance the Vincent represented in comparison to the archaic American V-twins, and Marty beat ‘em all [read our story on the 'Blue Bike' here].
We film Marty talking to Philip Vincent’s grandson, not only about his relationship with Vincent himself – "talking to him was just like to talking to you now," he says, eerily – but the time he raced against motorcycle-mounted cops, who had heard of ‘that guy with the British bike’ who was beating all-comers. Just before they set off Marty, with his typical wry bluntness, checked with the cops: 'If I beat you, are you going to give me a ticket?’ They said no. So Marty beat the Indian-mounted police in an illegal drag race. And they all went their separate ways.
There is a beautiful moment when Philip walks across the desert floor to meet the man to whom his grandfather uttered the immortal words, "Son, speed is expensive." Philip Vincent said it when Marty asked him if he could have go-faster parts for his Rapide. "What he said was so true," Marty reminisces.
Marty Dickerson back in the day with his Blue Bike
There are a few other Vincents here on this day in the desert. One started as a 1948 Black Shadow, which Greg McBride has built into a road-legal machine based on the ‘Bathing Suit’ Black Lightning of the 150mph record breaker Rollie Free. Greg’s bike has an electric starter, a Manx Norton-style handlebar nacelle, and a seat made by Michael Maestas, in California. The engine was rebuilt by the late Mike Parti - Steve McQueen, Bud Ekins and Jay Leno were among his clients - and features Terry Prince cylinder heads with squish combustion chambers, bigger valves, an 8.5:1 compression ratio, Mk II 32mm Amal carburetors, a twin-plug conversion by Pazon in New Zealand, and a multiplate clutch from Coventry Spares in Massachusetts.
Purists might look down on this bike, but Greg is rightly proud of what he has achieved. "It wasn’t a matching numbers bike, so it was a great candidate for this project," he says. "It’s a loose interpretation of the Rollie Free bike, but it’s legal to ride on the street. Seeing that picture of Rollie as a kid made me want a Vincent. It’s about that whole mythical crap behind the Vincent. And so much of it was true."
David Lancaster interviewing Marty Dickerson for SpeedisExpensive
By the time we’ve finished filming Marty, dusk is falling over the Mojave, and there is little time to film Greg. He still wants to fire the bike up, however, and the sound of that V-twin motor blatting through 2in-diameter pipes reminds us of why they named the Vincent ‘The Snarling Beast’ back in the day. Greg takes off in the gathering gloom, leaving dust trails as he guns the bike through the gears. In the distance he turns round and the noise and the dust come back towards us. He does a few runs at over 80mph, helmetless, and he isn’t using the headlight. "That’s risky," Marty opines. Yes, it is, but exposure to Vincents seems to bring on extreme behavior.
FRIDAY
West LA fade away / West LA fade away / Big red light on the highway, little green light on the freeway - The Grateful Dead, 'West LA Fadeaway'
Today we have a simple 40-minute drive to Pomona and the NHRA drag racing museum. Another famous Vincent, the Barn Job, is displayed here and its owner John Stein is waiting at the entrance to greet us. John has authored a book, 'Motorcycle Drag Racing: A History', that chronicles quarter-mile heroics in the USA. He especially likes the maverick early days of drag racing. "The riders were like gunslingers from the Wild West," he says. "They all had a certain swagger. They were a cult as interesting as the machines themselves."
Jim Leineweber with the bike he took to over 180mph on the dragstrip, the Barn Job
"Drag racing in the early days was like Bonneville, in that there were no books on how to build a bike or a car. They were strangers in a strange land. They were feeling their way through it. They didn’t have dynos or flow benches, and it was all done by intuition. The Barn Job is the drag bike in terms of how it performed," he asserts. "The bike was the first to go 140, 150 and 160mph. It was the loudest, meanest machine there was."
The Barn Job’s builder, Clem Johnson, based it on a 1954 Rapide and modified it for the new sport of drag racing. Over the years he boosted the capacity from the standard 61 cubic inches to 96 (1573cc), went to nitromethane fuel, fitted a Magnusson supercharger, fuel injection, an alloy frame that doubled as a fuel tank, and a front down tube that carried the oil. He made his own flywheels, valves, pistons and cams, and lightened the bike to only 260lb.
Jim Leineweber in action, with a supercharger fitted to the Barn Job
Jim Leineweber rode the Barn Job to its fastest ever pass, at 8.40s and a terminal of 187mph, shortly before the bike’s last run in 1987. ‘"It’s a jewel, ain’t it," Jim, now 82, says as he gazes down at the Barn Job. I was interested in Jim’s riding technique on the bike, given that in the pioneering era of drag racing slipper clutches and specialized transmissions were not available. Riders and drivers used the rear tyre as a clutch, smoking the rubber all the way through the quarter in a single-gear pass.
"I only ever rode it in high gear," Jim confirms. ‘The bike had that Vincent clutch that would slip and burr, and then it would start spinning the tyre a little ways out. A lot of guys popped the clutch and spun, but I would ride the clutch, bring the engine up over 5000rpm and drive it with the power."
Two major badass Vincents: both record-setters. The Blue Bike and Barn Job.
Artist, former Clash bassist and keen motorcyclist Paul Simonon has already been interviewed for the film – he’s producing litho cuts of the bikes – and today we were joined by another rock legend, Daniel Ash, formerly of Bauhaus. A Brit, now living in California, Daniel has a fleet of bikes, and for a brief period owned a Vincent Comet. "I was busy with the band, and moving to the USA - so that meant I had to sell it," he relays. "Do I regret selling it? Do you need to ask?..."
SATURDAY
Welcome to the Hotel California / You can check out any time you like / But you can never leave - The Eagles, 'Hotel California'
It’s our last day. Tonight we must fly back to England. The Southern California Vincent fraternity have been generous to us beyond all expectations, but they’re not finished with us yet. We’re heading south across LA to visit another Vincent owner, Rob Arnott, who recalls: "I was in my mid-thirties in the 1990s when I bought my first Vincent. It was a Black Shadow, and for a time it was my daily rider. What an innovation the monoshock frame was."
Volumes of archival material, as well as hours of footage shot by Philip Vincent himself will be included in 'SpeedIsExpensive'
"I marvel at what the performance would have been by the standards of the era when the Black Shadow was launched - 125mph when a Ferrari would barely break 100mph, and a Harley 74 would only do 85 or 90. The best thing about a Vincent? The way it does everything right. The package - handling, performance, aesthetics - was so far ahead of its time. The worst thing about the Vincent? They went out of business."
With that we head north to Bill Easter’s home just south of LAX. Bill edits the SoCal Vincent club’s newsletter and has a Black Shadow famed in Vincent circles for having covered some 420,000 miles, owned by him since the late 1950s. Here we meet John Griffiths, a Welshman who emigrated to the USA, and who raced Vincents and worked on the production line in the Stevenage factory. Now in his early nineties, but with a mind as sharp as ever, John tells young Philip: "Your grandfather was a brilliant man with original ideas, and that’s rare."
The Barn Job with current custodian John Stein, at the NHRA Motorsports Museum it calls home
Why did the Vincent factory fail in 1955, despite all the rave road test reviews and the speed records? "Your grandfather wasn’t a businessman," John tells Philip. "There were a number of faults in the business plan. Their hiring methods were wrong, and aspects of the bike were over-engineered. When sales were diminishing, he borrowed more money."
Now it’s time for the final ten-minute sprint to LAX. It’s been a vivid five days, and we’ve got a stack of material for our documentary: Vincent factory hands, record setters, long-term owners and fans - and a real sense of how important the West Coast is to the Vincent story. For our documentary, Philip and co-producer Gerry Jenkinson have logged, restored and digitized hours of period footage shot by Philip Vincent himself, much of which shows his own travels and love affair with America, and with California in particular during the 1940s and 50s. This archive, and Philip’s interviews with the men and women who worked with the grandfather he never met, will make our documentary a compelling insight into the most charismatic of motorcycles and the man behind them.
Sunset at El Mirage with a Black Lightning replica and the Blue Bike
The trip has also raised questions. Why didn’t a British motorcycle maker recruit Philip Vincent when his own factory failed? Why did British factories continue making parallel-twins, which vibrated more with every increase in power and capacity, instead of following Vincent’s lead and making V-twins? The collapse of the British motorcycle industry in the 1970s might have been avoided.
As we board the plane I’m thinking of a quote that came from James Salter somewhere on all those freeway miles. James said: "They made ‘em fast in England. Then they came to Southern California and we made ‘em faster." So right. LA and its Vincent fraternity and history will pull us back.
It wasn't built for this - moving the Barn Job for the film shoot.
………………..
We’ll carry more updates on shooting of SpeedisExpensive: The Untold Story of the Vincent Motorcycle over the coming months. Check out www.speedisexpensive.com, also it’s on Facebook and on Instagram @speed_is_expensive. The film is due out next year.
In the dark days immediately following WW2, Germany and Italy were banned from participating in international motorsport on two or four wheels. The reasons were complicated: the victorious nations couldn't stomach the thought of losing a race to competitors from a country they'd been at war with for 6 years, and immediately before the war, German and Italian factories built the fastest and most sophisticated car and motorcycles in the world. Since development of civilian vehicle designs was illegal or strongly frowned upon in several Allied countries during the war (to focus ingenuity on winning), motorsports resumed in 1946/7 as it had left off in 1939/40, with the very same machines, although supercharging was banned by the FIM for the motorcycle Grand Prix circuit, so quite a few prewar designs had to be altered for natural aspiration.
While the BMW parentage is clear, what's new is the amazing Giant's Fist - the OHC cylinder head of the home-made MFK special [Hockenheim Motosports Archive]Banned from international competition didn't mean racing stopped in German and Italy, and national-level racing resumed by 1946. Freed from the FIM rules against supercharging, the same RS255 BMWs and NSU blown twins appeared on the tracks postwar, much to the fascination of the American troops occupying both countries, especially in Germany. American motorcycle fans had never seen and seldom heard about these sophisticated machines, and soldiers were gobsmacked by what they witnessed, especially if they were racers themselves on Class C machinery: rigid-framed Harley-Davidson and Indian sidevalve v-twins of 750cc.
The MFK flat twin being hauled around the track; note the slim profile of the cylinder heads [Hockenheim Motosports Archive]Of course, except for riders with factory connections, most would-be German or Italian racers had nothing so exotic to race! Modifying prewar or military machinery was the only viable path, and such machinery filled the grids in the years when German and Italian industries were also forbidden to build machines larger than mopeds. In Germany, the BMW R75M was a common foundation for racing, with its 750cc OHV motor placed in a civilian R51 or R66 fully sprung, lightweight chassis, and tuned up with bigger valves and carburetors, and hotter camshafts.
The tidy, if massively built MFK modification to a BMW R75M motor [Hockenheim Motosports Archive]Some home tuners took the R75M much further than mere tuning, and the most impressive example of a home-made racer with world-class performance is the little-known MFK racer, a collaboration of Franz Mohr, Kurt Friz, and Hans Kleinhenz-Schweinfurt. It's an awesome machine, that still exists in as-raced condition in Germany, a testament to hard work and ingenuity by ordinary motorcyclists with no engineering training to speak of.
Franz Mohr was interviewed in a German magazine in 1949 about his fantastic creation:
"After the end of the racing season in 1947, during which I drove a refurbished BMW R75M engine in its original Wehrmacht frame, I came up with the idea to convert this engine into a overhead camshaft motor. Thanks to the energetic support of the well-known racing driver Kurt Fuglein, the financial basis for such a project was established.
The MFK after being transferred to a BMW R66 chassis [Hockenheim Motosports Archive]In December 1947 I began, as a professional motor mechanic, on a primitive drawing board, the sketching and designing of our MFK motor. The basis was the old BMW R75M engine, whose crankcase and crankshaft were carried over to our project. The central idea was to use everything that could be used somehow, in order to keep the costs - which started out huge anyway - as low as possible. The camshaft of the R75 engine was not used; instead, a camshaft with adjustable cams was placed in each cylinder head, driven by bevel gears, a drive shaft and corresponding pieces. At the same time a gear oil pump was coupled with cylinder head, for each individual cam to lubricate the cylinder head via a pressurized system with fresh oil. The motor oil was cooled by an oil radiator, in a continuous system with the crankshaft, bearings, cylinders, cam drive shafts and cylinder heads.
Inside the cylinder head, with the OHC drive visible, all home-made [Hockenheim Motosports Archive]The parts required for all this have been produced in my little workshop, and also the machine shop of Hans Kleinhenz-Schweinfurt, a pure master of his trade and pure idealist of motorsport, who works with painstaking craftsmanship.
New parts included two new crankshaft drive housings, screwed to the former magneto shaft; two camshafts connected to the crankshaft by two shafts; four special gray cast iron cylinders with four large square-threaded cylinder head bolts; 4 cylinder heads and valve covers, for which first models were made; 8 rocker arms; the associated axles, bearing housings, valves, and camshafts. The cams, made by hand, had to be ground one degree at a time, since no cam grinder was available for us; 8 output housing for the conical shafts and their bearings, lock nuts, protective tubes with rubber rings for oil seals.
Changing tires during a race [Hockenheim Motosports Archive]My friend and lubrication master Kurt Fritz and 5-6 companions helped me in their leisure time with all these and other great things; they even sacrificed their vacation for up to 120 hours a week. Of Sundays and holidays, there were no more for months, and after-work was a flexible concept. My poor wife became merely a maid, but bravely held through, to support the big goal. Often I worked up to 100 hours continuously with only 3-4 hours of sleep. I owe this endurance and energy to certain envious people who foretold a full fiasco: they did not trust such a job to a simple engine mechanic, especially not in such a short time, without help or support from any designer or engineer for solving problems. According to their view, even factories worked for years on such a redesign.
The MFK as it appears today [Hockenheim Motosports Archive]All this I knew and all this spurred me all the more. The 'apple cart' overturned after my wife and I had already sacrificed so many pieces of clothing and furnishings to live, and only just live. In between, I rode off with my old racer and earned money off a race, partly with, partly without success - but we had some money again and continued to work. Who can imagine what it means to do such work without training, without a technical cylinder head design for a bevel drive OHC (with partial views and cuts), so the mould maker can build the casting moulds without a single question? That the heads were cast, and handed off to others with only my blueprints, to be drilled and processed accordingly? Not only the cylinder head: hundreds of parts were needed for this redesign, and everything had to be calculated beforehand. I agree, engineers had done it before - but I had no such experience. So I sacrificed night after night, studied in technical books and moved toward my goal.
In action! Love the trainers on the feet of the sidecar passenger - clearly the rider (Mohr?) and passenger and dedicated! [Hockenheim Motosports Archive]What this also means, is that the materials used for various parts of the motor - the gears, the shafts, the camshaft, the rockers, etc, had to be processed and hardened as well, in the ways that each required, which were all different: this cost me 'several' gray hairs.
But one day it was finally time. Perhaps the readers will be able to gauge what this was for us - that inner joy - all the effort, all the hate was forgotten, and we listened to the engine with devotion. A few days later, on July 4, 1948, was the Garmisch race. With the new engine, I drove the fastest practice time, but then had to replace the bike and race my old loyal R75, as our camshaft shapes had to be changed. Within eight days we had made new camshafts, and in Karlsruhe I easily won the first prize. Another eight days later, we drove in Reutlingen, setting the fastest lap of all sidecar classes with 83.6kmh, but could then hold only second place due to clutch problems. Again, we had to make a new clutch, because the high engine output of our OHC motor resulted in failure.
Period photos of the special racing wheels built by FMK, and the very standard BMW roadster chassis, without added friction damping for the rear plungers as on the factory BMW racers [Hockenheim Motosports Archive]I had to renounce further races for a time, because our MKF motor exposed other chassis difficulties, and we converted to an R66 plunger rear frame. Result: change the frame, turn a new rear hub, make new set of final drive gears, turn a new shaft, change the tailpipes - in other words: an unspeakable amount of new work had to be done. Those who have not done such work themselves cannot gauge what is involved in not 'throwing the gun into the grain'.
For the first time, I returned to the Grenzland track and achieved the fastest practice time. By an most unfortunate event, I retired in the second lap of the race: the undisciplined behavior of the spectators, who compared the route to a wastebasket, was to blame. A large bag, without being noticed by me, caught on my left cylinder, blocking its cooling: the piston melted, and molten aluminum stuck on the crankshaft. By the way, Eberlein (a factory BMW racer) fared just as well, - his motor ate a scrap of paper and tore off his cylinder.
Now a short summary of the entire working hours:
Design hours: 580
Planning, making tools: 250
Pattern-making hours: 1000
Machining hours: 2500
Assembly hours: 950
Testing and fettling: 500"
[If you've ever considered building your own motor, or wondered at the expense of custom machine work, the above hours are sobering!- ed.]
There's an incredible selection of motorcycles coming up for auction at Bonhams Auctions' inaugural Barber Museum Sale during the Barber Vintage Festival this year, including a Vincent Black Lightning and an equally rare 1928 Windhoff four-cylinder oil-cooled Art Deco masterpiece. The auction is undoubtedly a testing of the waters, to see if the Barber Festival attracts the kind of crowd that can support a first-rate auction, and while the event is small compared to the mega-weekend at Las Vegas in January, there are some real gems on offer.
Bauhaus for your house? This amazing BMW poster from c.1925 is pure 1920s graphic design, and as such will command a very high price ($6k estimate). It's an amazing and ultra-rare piece of ephemera from BMW's earliest racing period, a mere 3 years or so after the company was founded - the bike is an R37 or R47. [Bonhams]It's nice to see a healthy selection of automobilia at Barber, as...sometimes you don't need another motorcycle, but can justify a cool, rare poster...ask me how I know. The emphasis this year is on Daytona and BMW-related posters, postcards, medals, etc, which seem to be from one collection (likely Florida?). Definitely check out the posters!
Cheeky fun! This 1952 Cushman Model 62 'Turtleback' Scooter is original paint, and pretty awesome as is! [Bonahms]The quirky selection of motorcycles starts with this great little Cushman scooter in original, cheeky paint. As shop or pit bikes go, this one's about perfect. There are of course several major machines coming up though, including Erik Buell's first production motorcycle (a two-stroke four-cylinder racer), Steve McQueen's documented real 'On Any Sunday' Husqvarna, a stunning 1936 Brough Superior SS80, and terrific 1928 Windhoff four-cylinder oil-cooled masterpiece, and of course, the second-built Vincent Black Lightning with full provenance from new.
The very 1970 Husqvarna 400 Cross ridden by Steve McQueen in the final, memorable sequence of 'On Any Sunday'. For provenance, this is about as cool as it gets [Bonhams]An award-winning concours restoration of a 1936 Brough Superior SS80. What's it like to ride one? Read our Road Test of an SS80 here!
It's the end of Day 6 in our cross-country journey, which started inauspiciously for team Vintagent/Sinless/Revival and our two Brough Superiors. In an effort to gain more life and safety on the 1926 SS100, we tried automotive tires for its 'clincher' rims, as car tires are the only highway-rated tires available, and other Cannonballers use them, like Shinya Kimura on his 1915 Indian v-twin. The Brough Superior is a different kettle of fish to the little Indian, and we had 3 blowouts in the first 24 hours of the Cannonball. The cure? Removing the paint from inside the wheel rims, glueing the tires to the rims, then drilling sheet metal screws into the tires through the rims! Problem cured - the Brough has simply too much horsepower not to secure the tires to the rim.
[Alan Stulberg]How much horsepower? On Day 2, we stopped at a Harley-Davidson dealership in Falconer, New York, who offered free dynamometer testing for our bikes. Revival's Alan Stulberg couldn't help but try the SS100, but the comparisons are telling: a 1923 Triumph 550cc single-cylinder made 4hp, a 1913 Thor v-twin made 10hp, a 1922 Indian Chief made 14.3hp, a 1928 Indian 4 made 18.5hp, and the Brough SS100 had 57.5 ft-lbs of torque and made 30hp before a misfire set in at 2800rpm. No wonder the tires spun.
The Cannonball started cold and wet, and Day 3 was even cancelled for rain and flooding along our backwoods route ever westward. But the roads were dreamy, following rivers and mountains, passing through tiny communities, with a lot of vacant industrial buildings in the larger towns of rural New York, New Hampshire, and Ohio. To a Californian, a city block sized old industrial-glazed warehouse looks very tempting, but there isn't a lot going on in these towns. S0me renovation and rehab is apparent in a few towns, and we were constantly on the search for a good lunch or dinner spot. Our rule is to always choose local businesses, and the food is usually good if not great.
We loved coming across the Amish communities with their horse-drawn carriages and immaculate farms, and even stopped to chat with a few men repairing a barn who'd waved at us. With no electricity, power tools, or vehicles with motors, it was strictly skilled manual labor that built their houses and barns, although we weren't allowed to park our bikes near them, or photograph the gents in question. They were happy to answer questions, though, and greeted us cheerily. The countryside from Vermont to Iowa is dotted with Amish communities, and coming across their horses and carts was a highlight.
The roads were hilly, winding, and fun through Pennsylvania and New York, but started to smooth out as we reached Ohio, eventually becoming entirely flat, with long stretches of straight roads. We're still in that fix in Iowa as we push onwards, and today's ride included 60 miles of freeway, which is rough on old bikes. The SS100 has proved well up the task, often arriving first at our lunch or finish for the day. Our SS80 had some trouble and is hors de combat for now, after a loose valve cap led to a piston seizure, which seems to have bent a rod as well. Alan was riding at the time, and we were 23 miles from our destination in Anamosa, Iowa, in the tiny hamlet of Oxford Crossing.
While waiting for the chase truck, a young local pulled up on his yellow dirt bike, asking all sorts of questions about our bikes. He (Alex) seemed good company for Alan, so I left them and motored on. As they chatted on the sidewalk, a shirtless, bedraggled homeowner emerged with a double-barreled shotgun, shouting 'get off my flowers!' Alan replied he was in fact on the sidewalk, but the man repeated his demand, and pointed the shotgun at them, at which point Alex exited, but not before Alan told him to call the police. At that moment, the chase truck arrived, and Alan was rescued from the scene. But the fellow had a visit from several police cars, and was arrested, saying in his defense 'I thought they were both black guys'.
With the SS80 out, I've been riding solo, and my SS100 keeps a pace no other Cannonballer can match. We have small issues, like trouble starting, and chain oiling, and modest vibration making for the occasional loose bolt, but mostly, the bike is a peach. Well, more than a peach - it's a masterpiece of 20th Century design, and an absolute pleasure to ride, with bags of smooth power, a gorgeous exhaust note that's more a vintage speedboat burble than a v-twin bark, and absolutely stable handling, barring the many road heaves that momentarily aviate us.
It's a 7:30am start time for Class III, and a 314 mile ride tomorrow to Pierre, South Dakota, where it's expected to hit 92degrees. What a contrast to our first days in the East when it barely hit the 50s, and Fall was definitely in the air and on the trees. Onward, towards Sturgis.
Portland to Portland: while it may be poetic to bracket the country with homonymous towns, what happens between them will surely be filled with drama. That's my assessment after participating in 4 Motorcycle Cannonball Endurance Rallies since 2012 (it's biannual): those 3600 miles of back roads are the stage on which an endless variety of experience will play out over the next 18 days, the failures, the falls, the fatigue, and the fires. And the sheer joy of riding a 90+ year old motorcycle all day, every day, for more than 2 weeks.
Our path is laid out on roll charts, with typically 15 or 20 pages of rally-style instructions, for a daily journey of between 230 to 350 miles. There’s no was to preview the day’s route, but we know our target town and hotel, so the roll chart is our trail of breadcrumbs, and woe betide mis-steps or mis-readings in some backwoods county of Pennsylvania or Wyoming, where opportunities to get lost are endless, and signage confusing or nonexistent. It’s a rolling circus barreling through 16 mid-sized towns with sufficient bed space for 3-400 dedicants to the cult of the Old Motorcycle. 100 of whom will be tired, or despairing, or jubilant, or angry, or injured, or simply bemused at the kaleidoscopic variety of experience from a full day of riding a vintage bike.
We've already seen the crowd of machinery for this year's rally, which is typically Harley-heavy, but has a in interesting mix of Indians, Thors, Excelsiors, Hendersons, Triumphs, Nortons, an Ariel, and the pair of Brough Superiors we're riding with rally partners Revival Cycles and Sinless Cycles, whose owner Bryan Bossier owns both our bikes. Our team is riding a 1925 Brough Superior SS80, and a 1926 SS100, and Revival’s Chris Davis will massage them nightly, just as he did our 1933 Brough Superior 11.50 in the 2014 Cannonball. Revival's Alan Stulberg will no doubt push the performance envelope on the SS80, in his usual hurryup style, while Suzie Heartbreak and myself will try to keep the SS100 under its 100+mph top speed. We and 98 other riders will chunter, thump, and burble away from our hotel this morning amid smoke and cheers, with the long miles stretching ahead, our future visible at least regarding the path, but the experiences to come remain a mighty question mark. Fingers crossed!
The story that George Hendee first met Oscar Hedstrom in December 1899 during the races at Madison Square Garden is possible, but not likely, and it certainly wasn’t at the New York Cycle and Auto Show the following month. It remains pure speculation as to when and where they first met, but since both men were bicycle builders and racing champions working within the same regional network, it could have been almost anytime between 1895 and 1901. While they had that in common, Hendee’s focus was on business and Hedstrom’s on mechanics, and both were highly regarded for their skills. It was a partnership that would, within a decade, create the largest motorcycle manufacturer in the world.
Oscar Hedstrom in Spring of 1901 with his very first prototype motorcycle, built for George Hendee. Note the Worcester Cycle Manufacturing Co. sign: the location was Middletown, Connecticut, where Hedstrom rented workshop space (including the use of tools) for $1/day. This prototype was finished by May 1901, and taken to Springfield for demonstrations at Hendee's facilities there.
When Hendee decided to enter the motor bicycle market is also open to conjecture. What we do know is that George Hendee and Oscar Hedstrom signed a partnership agreement sometime early in 1901 and leased Hedstrom’s former shop, Worcester Cycle Mfg.—then in receivership—to create the prototype motor bicycle. By the end of April the press was reporting that Hedstrom was building a machine for the Hendee Mfg. Co. and that “hereafter he will be identified with that concern.” The curious thing is that the frame—designed specifically to fit Hendee and Hedstrom—was not built by Hedstrom.
Oscar Hedstrom with the finished prototype in 1901: note there's still no Indian script on the fuel tank.
The first tests were conducted in Middletown, Connecticut, and on May 25 Hedstrom and the motorcycle arrived in Springfield, Massachusetts, by train. The launch of the Hedstrom's motor bicycle took place on Saturday, June 1, at the Cross Street hill in Springfield where a reporter at the scene described a crowd of 400-500 people watching as Hedstrom rode his machine up the 19-percent grade of the loose-gravel street with power to spare.
George Hendee on a production Indian 'camelback' model ca.1904
Indian motor bicycle production didn’t begin until the fall. The pacing team of Henshaw and Hedstrom was still in evidence and they gave a half-mile, motor tandem exhibition in Buffalo on August 7 in which they broke the world record with a time of 39.2 seconds. On August 12 they establish a new mile record for motor tandems and won the 10-mile motor tandem race. Even as late as August 15, it was reported that Hendee was still in the process of raising the necessary capital for the venture and that the Indian prototype was on display in a retail store in Springfield. It’s safe to assume that Oscar Hedstrom didn’t depart for Illinois to begin working with the Aurora Automated Machine Manufacturing Co. until at least late August.
By 1903, Hedstrom would begin a series of annual forays to Ormond Beach Florida (Daytona), where he could test the speed potential of his machines to the full. This experimental racer is considerably different than the production Indians, having a full tube frame (with swan-neck front downtube) and no engine as a stressed frame member. It has no pedals, a large intermediate sprocket for higher speed, different tinware, and racing bicycle handlebars.
At the end of October, Oscar Hedstrom filed for several patents, including a chain adjuster, an engine valve, a control mechanism for engines, and the iconic camelback fuel and oil tank. Obviously the motorcycle was in production by this date, but the deal between Aurora and Hendee Mfg. wasn’t announced to the press until the beginning of November. The Bicycling World & Motocycle Review stated that Aurora had been testing the machine and that “motors are expected to be delivered by the end of the year.” On November 7, an Indian motor bicycle was displayed at the New York Auto Show and a week later George W. Sherman sailed for England on the Oceanic to attend the Stanley automotive show.
The first advertisement for the Hendee motorcycle appeared in November 1901 - note no mention of the Indian name in the ad, nor any Indian script on the 'camelback' fuel tank.
The first ads for the Indian motor bicycle appeared in November and Sherman returned from London with 150 orders and had acquired agents in England, Holland and Belgium. A letter from Hendee on February 13 informed a prospective agent that the “Indian Motocycle” —the earliest known use of the word “motocycle” for the Indian—would be demonstrated at the Boston Sportsman Show on February 23. By the first week in March 1902, Fred Randall, the Boston agent for Indian, had booked 37 motocycles for April delivery and George Sherman stated, “The motor bicycle has brought in so many new agents that it will be a task to meet the demand for push cycles.”
A second shot of Hedstrom at Daytona in 1903 aboard his specially-constructed land speed racer.
It has been reported that only 137 motorcycles (the Smithsonian claims it was 143) were produced in 1902, yet this year’s model in the Smithsonian Institution is serial number 150. Hedstrom didn’t file for a patent on his famous carburetor until May, which suggests he was still fine tuning it even during production. There were other issues. In March 1904, Alex Levedahl, president of Aurora Manufacturing, stated in a lecture to the Chicago Motor-Cycle Club that casting a cylinder was difficult and only about 40 percent were good. Also, every engine that arrived in Springfield was completely disassembled and reassembled, and every motor bicycle was tested on the Cross Street hill before shipment—if it didn’t pass, it went back to the shop and was adjusted or fitted with a new engine (hence the serial number discrepancy). This engine work was personally supervised and inspected by Hedstrom, plus he did the adjustments on the carburetors. It’s not surprising that deliveries couldn’t keep up with orders and this would remain a problem until 1904.
George Hendee in 1902 during the Hartford-Boston-New York endurance race, which he won.
From the very beginning, advertising for the Indian was based on its superiority over the competition, and Hedstrom’s reputation as a mechanic. George Hendee winning the famous endurance races in 1902 and 1903, proved that the Indian could reliably carry a 243-pound man over the atrocious roads of that era and that mechanically it was superior to the other makes in these competitions. It is also important to note that in the 1902 endurance race Hendee’s bike was fitted with the prototype Indian twist grip, just one example of these competitions being used as real-world testing grounds for Hedstrom’s inventions. Advertising capitalized on these wins and the reputation of the two men, so a lost victory was taken personally.
By 1904, Hedstrom's experiments included the very first Indian v-twin: this iteration was a very special racing model with minimal saddle and bicycle racing clips on the pedals.
Oscar Hedstrom was favored to win the New York Motor Cycle Club’s hill climb on May 30, 1903, but Glenn Curtiss showed up with his 5-hp v-twin Hercules and easily beat all 14 Indians entered in the event. In September Hedstrom arrived at the Rhode Island Automobile Club race meet “on an Indian without pedals and with a motor of greater power than on normal Indians.” [This may be the same machine he took to Ormond Beach - ed]. Four months later, at Ormond Beach, Hedstrom arrived on a parallel dual-engine, 5-hp Indian to go head-to-head against Curtiss and his v-twin, but to no avail. Then, on August 5, 1904, Hedstrom showed up at Newport Beach, Rhode Island, on the first Indian v-twin. The 3-hp v-twin was run in Orange, New Jersey, on November 26 and raced at Ormond Beach in January 1905. One might consider this to be the origin of factory race programs being used for retail product development since the new 2.25-hp single-cylinder engine, designed to power the new Indian Tri-Car, was in production by November 1905.
Hedstrom on the first Indian v-twin in 1904, in a rugged landscape (Newport Beach, Rhode Island?), and with a slightly more orthodox saddle than the pure racing item seen above.
The early history of Indian motorcycles is based on isolated facts published in contemporary news accounts and surviving ephemera, but there are tremendous gaps in our knowledge. Descriptions of the State Street factory in 1906 make no mention of forging or casting capabilities. When did the forging factory in Hendeeville (West Springfield) begin operation? Exactly when were the Indian assembly plants established in other countries? What did the Indian pace machines built in 1904 look like? Why were competing motorcycle brands using Aurora-produced Hedstrom parts not as successful as the Indian? Even the answers to basic questions—when did Hendee and Hedstrom first meet, and how many Indians were made in 1901—remain to be answered. With the reintroduction of the Indian brand, interest in the true history of this iconic American motorcycle company has been resurrected. It promises to be a great story.
Popular history has George Hendee witnessing Oscar Hedstrom’s tandem pacer in action during the December 1900 races at Madison Square Garden, where he was so impressed that he offered Hedstrom a partnership. Another version dates their meeting a year earlier, and suggests Hendee booked the motor tandem team of Henshaw and Hedstrom to pace races at the Springfield Colosseum for the 1901 season. In Middletown, Connecticut, 42 miles from Springfield, Massachusetts, Oscar Hedstrom had, by 1895, established a reputation as a builder of custom racing bicycles. He worked at the Worcester Cycle Manufacturing Co, where he created the Birdie Special. In October 1895, Hedstrom changed his club affiliation to team up with another Worcester employee, Charles Henshaw, to create a professional tandem pacer team, and they quickly became known as one of the fastest tandem teams on the racing circuit.
The pacer cycle built by Oscar Hedstrom in 1900 with his business partner Charles Henshaw, using a modified DeDion engine in a custom cycle chassis. Note the rear rider's position aft of the rear axle, as close as possible to a following cyclist to provide a draft.
Pacers were teams of men—usually two, but sometimes three or more—on multi-seat bicycles (tandems, triples, or quads) that would provide a high-speed pace for a racing bicyclist, and create a slipstream to reduce wind resistance. This allowed professional racers to increase their speed and endurance, recording higher top speeds for longer distances. Professional medium- and long-distance stars demanded unlimited pacer teams, and would often use 10 or 12 teams per race.
In France, Comte DeDion had designed a small internal combustion engine in 1896 and placed it in a tricycle, called the DeDion-Bouton. The following year they were producing and selling both the motor tricycles and individual engines, and they were popular, selling in the thousands (a racing series was even created for trikes). Kenneth Skinner of Boston acquired the sole U.S. distribution rights for the DeDion-Bouton in November 1897, and partnered with Charles Henshaw to open the Back Bay Cycle Company. Allegedly, Oscar Hedstrom learned to tune the engines of imported De Dion-Bouton tricycles and quadricycles the following year.
It's little known that internal-combustion pacers weren't the first motorized pacers: electric-powered pacing cycles were among the first electric two-wheelers, and were a common sight in Europe in the 1897/8 racing season. In the 1898 World Championship in France, no less than 17 electric tandems and triples were present. This triple was built in 1898 by the Jallu brothers of France, and the riders are Jules Thé, Fritz Steger, and Marius Thé, who would move on to motorcycle racing in the 1900s, becoming a champion in the Age of Monsters - see them here. [Hockenheim Museum Archive]In the fall of 1898, French racing champions Henri Fournier and Gaston Ricard toured the U.S, and brought with them three motorized pacers: a single, a tandem and a tricycle. The first official bicycle race in the U.S. using a motorized pacer took place at the Waltham, Massachusetts, racetrack in November 1898. The second race was held at Madison Square Garden on December 3, where Fournier, on the motorized single-seater, paced Eddie McDuffee, and also demonstrated his pacer with other racing stars. Between races he rode the tandem motor pacer before a crowd of 10,000 spectators.
On December 26th 1898, a 20-mile race was held at Madison Square Garden: Fournier on his solo mechanical pacer led Jay Eaton and Teddy Goodman, while Harry Elkes was paced by a series of seven man-powered tandem teams working in sequence. The event was billed as man against machine, a popular subject in the age of John Henry, and the dawn of motorized transport. Unfortunately, the drive belt on Fournier’s machine parted during the third mile and took him out of the race. Oscar Hedstrom was present that day, and competed in the professional half-mile race (placing 1st) and the one-mile handicap (placing 2nd): it’s hard to imagine that he missed seeing Fournier’s pacer perform.
The Eddie Macduffee pacer as seen at the Springfield Colloseum in 1900. It's an enormous machine!
In March of 1899, Fournier built a motor tandem configured as a “bob tail.” This chassis design had been invented by Hedstrom the previous year, with the rear seat placed behind the axle to provide the racing bicyclist with a better slipstream; it would soon become an extremely popular pacer style. In May, Fournier began to import tandem motor pacers from France and first used them at Ambrose Park in Brooklyn. Demand was high, and that month the Fournier-Henshaw team also appeared at the Woodside track in Philadelphia and the Baltimore Colosseum. Although Charles Henshaw was involved with Fournier’s import business and pace team, he also organized his own professional motor-pacer teams and promoted races at Crystal Lake Park in Middletown, Connecticut.
The Waltham Manufacturing Co. was producing the popular Orient bicycle, and developed an Orient motor pacer using an Aster engine. It was finished in time for a race meet on May 30, 1899, and early in June, Henshaw was riding it at the Waltham and Charles River tracks. On June 17 at the Waltham racetrack, Fournier and Henshaw riding a French pacer were beaten by the Orient machine. The same happened at the Manhattan Beach track on July 4, except this time Henshaw and Fred Kent partnered on the Orient. By the fall of 1899, the Orient pacers (not retail motor bicycles) were being advertised for sale, with 25 sold by the end of the year: almost no champion bicyclist was willing to compete without a motor cycle pacing him.
An Orient pacer tandem of 1901, using an Aster motor: one of Indian's rivals in the pioneer American motorcycle industry. While production motorcycles were available from 1894 (the Hildebrand&Wolfmuller), the sport of pacer-racing did more to promote motorcycles and their development than any other avenue at the turn of the Century.
The evolution of and demand for motorized pacers was explosive. Promoters wanted them because they were less expensive than paying multiple teams of human pacers, and their novelty drew crowds [often these were the first motorized vehicles of any kind spectators had seen, and were certainly the first moto-cycles - ed.]. Racers wanted them because they attained faster times and thereby were able to establish new track records. In an October article in The Wheel & Cycling Review it was revealed that Frank Waller made $1,000 clear in one month while operating a motor pacer, and another champion racer made enough money to purchase a second pacer after only a month of operating his first. In one month during 1899, Fournier and Henshaw had 16 pacing engagements, and traveled over 10,000 miles to fulfill them. There was money to be made.
During this period, both Oscar Hedstrom and Charles Henshaw were also racing as professional bicyclists and, as a muscle-powered tandem team, held the national records for the unpaced half-mile and mile, and the mile and two-mile records for paced. As part of a quint (five-man tandem) team Hedstrom placed third at Ambrose Park in May, while Henshaw, paired with Kent, came in fourth. Unfortunately, on June 19th at Manhattan Beach in the fourth lap of the Great Atlantic Sweepstakes, Hedstom got tangled up in a spill with two other riders and dislocated his shoulder, which put him out of competition for the remainder of the season.
Like many other racing stars, Harry Elkes appeared in ads representing sponsors. He would die in a horrific accident in 1903 when a pacer rode over him. It's remarkable how little bicycles developed, or needed to develop, for the next 100 years.
On September 18 1899, Hedstrom teamed up with pattern designer William Russell Frisbie, who did contract work for Worcester Cycle Mfg., Waltham Mfg., and Keating Wheel Co: their aim was to create a motorized pacer. Hedstrom built a tandem frame and modified—or, at the very least, converted from metric to SAE—a DeDion engine in the shop that he had been renting from Worcester Cycle since February 1898. This tandem motor pacer, nicknamed the Royal Blue Express because of its paint and nickel fixtures, was built under contract for racing star Charles Miller. Weighing only 130lbs, it was tested on November 24, 1899, in Middletown, and three days later at the Berkley Oval in New York. It would be used in the main event at Madison Square Garden on December 16 to successfully pace Harry Elkes in the one-hour race.
The first Marsh Motor Bicycle was built in 1899, with a small DeDion motor attached to a bicycle., built by W.T. and A.R. Marsh in Brockton, MA. By 1901, the Marsh brothers were building their own motor based on the DeDion template, with 510cc capacity and an inlet-over-exhaust motor, with 'atmospheric' inlet valves. This pacer is likely from 1902: the Marsh brothers teamed up with Harry Metz (Orient) in 1905 to make Marsh-Metz (M-M) motorcycles from 1905-14.
The partnership between Hedstrom and Frisbee was dissolved in January 1900 because Frisbie wanted to develop marine engines and automobiles. Hedstrom continued working on his own motorized pacers fitted with his modified DeDion “Typhoon” engines (tandem #2 was built in May with a 3.25 hp engine and #3 had a 5 hp), and producing his Hedstrom Special racing bicycles. Several of the motor tandems were sold to racers in the spring, but despite numerous requests he stopped producing them during the race season due to racing team commitments.
In 1898, the Humber bicycle company of England built this electric tandem pacer, and soon expanded into proper motorcycle and car manufacturing. Note the four batteries, and the small motor beneath the chassis. [Francois-Marie Dumas / Moto-Collection.org]In March 1900, Kenneth Skinner retained the services of both Henshaw and Hedstrom as racing experts to represent his interests on the track, but it wasn’t an exclusive contract. The team of Henshaw and Hedstrom owned two Typhoon tandems and ran them with Everitt Ryand and Harry E. Caldwell—both champions—as steersmen during the 1900 race season, and there was the team of Fournier and Henshaw with its own hectic schedule. Although Hedstrom and Henshaw did pace in the Springfield event on July 31, the press mentioned one or the other men at numerous events from Philadelphia to Boston during the 1900 race season. The 15-mile motor tandem race that was held on December 28 at Madison Square Garden has provided a basis for one version of the Hendee-meets-Hedstrom myth, but whether or not either man attended that event remains unknown. However, that month it was announced that Charles Henshaw would be going on the road as the New England representative for the E.R. Thomas Motor Company. This, plus the Worcester Cycle Co. bankruptcy, may have had an impact on Hedstrom’s decision to seek another venture.
E. R. Thomas made the Auto-Bi, one of the first American motorcycles, and was represented by Charles Henshaw in NY and New England
The Vintagent Selects: A collection of our favorite films by artists around the world.
The Sight (2018)
Run Time: 2:07 Director: Ilham Nuriadi Music: Kimo Rizky Motorcycle: Thrive 027
SUMMARY
When electronic music producer Kimo Rizky ordered a custom motorcycle from Indonesia's Thrive Motorcycle, he also chose to record the sounds of its construction: hammering, drilling, grinding, etc. Rizky then mixed these sounds with an electronic beat, making music from his Thrive 027 custom motorcycle, and Ilham Nuriadi directed this short film with Rizky's music and the motorcycle.
Skirting the western Pyrenees from Biarritz towards San Sebastian it becomes clear why this is such a great region for motorcycling and surfing. Driving into San Sebastian, the mountains give way to the sea, greeting you with a gorgeous blue sky and the beach at La Concha. It’s hard to leave this seductive scene, but just a bit down the road is a garage that sums up everything memorable in the world of motorcycles: Café Racer SSpirit (the double SS is for San Sebastian). Juan Carlos López, Hugo López and Juan Pablo Santinelli started Cafe Racer SSpirit in 2014 as a custom motorcycle shop. For the trio, building customs is about more than the metal: they believe that for a motorcycle to resonate for a customer, it’s important to learn about the history, heritage and culture behind the machine.
Cafe Racer SSpirit co-owner Pablo Santinelli wrenches on a Martin-framed custom Suzuki GSXR [Bhuvan Chowdhary]This CRSS philosophy must also resonate, because in a short period of time, the trio has made quite the name for themselves not only in San Sebastian, but across Europe too. Last year Cafe Racer SSpirit was one of 7 shops selected (and the official entry from Spain) to build a custom motorcycle for the Yamaha Yard Built program: their machine, the Café Racer SSpirit XS700-R, debuted at Wheels and Waves in 2017. Their Yamaha custom cafe racer has a minimal, old-school charm, resembling a Bol D’or racer (minus its fairing), but their XSR 700-R isn’t easily categorized.
The XSR700-R the shop modified for the Yard Built program [Bhuvan Chowdhary]While CRSS is primarily a custom motorcycles and apparel shop, they have a deep interest (and investment) in classic motorcycles. Sitting at the coffee table in the far corner of their workshop is a perfect location to ogle their line-up of vintage machine, mechanical marvels from the 1960s, ‘70, and ‘80s lined up in immaculate condition. This is candy land for the moto-initiated.
Rare as hen's teeth: a Japauto Honda CB750 bored out to 1000ccs, number 25 of 73 built [Bhuvan Chowdhary]Behind the coffee table is a gorgeous Honda VFR 750, RC30 (Frame no. 87), and on the left is a Triumph corner: classic Bonnevilles sit beside a single-cylinder Tiger Cub T20, next to a 350cc T90, a 650cc T100 & a 750cc T140. In the center of the room sits a mix of European and Japanese bikes, highlighted by a gorgeous and very rare Japauto VX1000 endurance racer, and a red Dunstall Honda CR750, frame #0025. The Japauto VX1000 is one of only 73 examples made, and was a special machine in its day, costing three times as much as a standard Honda CB750. Finding three Japautos parked in the CRSS garage is bold: this Spanish atelier is a truly special place to visit.
A Dunstall Honda 'CR750' conversion from the early 1970s [Bhuvan Chowdhary]With only a few hours to visit, I curtailed my inner child to focus on the job in hand - document the bikes. I walked the shop floor with Pablo Santinelli, who was calmly tinkering on a special Suzuki GSX with Moto Martin frame he’s building for a customer. My ear-to-ear grin pulled him into a conversation about the motorcycles parked all around, and Pablo fired up one of my bucket list machines – a Honda CBX. Its six-into-one custom megaphone exhaust filled the room with a few quick rips on the throttle, close to the best motorcycle sound I’ve ever heard, like a proper old-school Formula One car. What a screamer!
A lineup of Japanese classics from the 1980s: Honda CBX, CX500Turbo, a rare Euro-spec Suzuki Katana variant, etc. [Bhuvan Chowdhary]The shop floor at CRSS displays more than 100 motorcycles, with a backdrop of old fuel tanks. A long line of 500 and 750cc two-stroke Suzuki GTs recalled the utterly mad times when people flew on these machines, with little wheel braking and no engine braking! Beside the mental two-strokes was a line-up of some special Japanese bikes from the 80s, including a rare Honda CX500 Turbo, flanked on each side by a mint Honda CBX and a special edition Suzuki Katana that was only sold in the United Kingdom and Italy. San Sebastian is a perfect spot for basking in the European summer: Cafe Racer SSpirit with their custom and classic motorcycle collection makes the town that much more enjoyable.
Cafe Racer SSpirit has about 100 bikes on display, from 1960s to 1980s is their specialty. [Bhuvan Chowdhary]Two rare Hondas: the Japauto 1000, and a replica of Dick Mann's Daytona-winning Honda CR750 [Bhuvan Chowdhary]A Dresda tank on a Triton, a classic combination [Bhuvan Chowdhary]A rare (perhaps for good reason) Honda CX500 Turbo [Bhuvan Chowdhary]A bit of product placement, but what a mantlepiece! Japautos are nonexistent in the USA [Bhuvan Chowdhary]Follow Bhuvan Chowdhary on Instagram: @B.choww | Facebook @B.choww
The pioneer years of the American motorcycle industry are poorly documented and murky, with complicated relationships between protagonists, including a free flow of ideas both across the Atlantic and within the US. The skills of an inventor, machinist, foundryman, bicycle builder, racer, promoter, entrepreneur, and manufacturer were rarely housed in one person, and shifting alliances were the norm at the turn of the Century between those with particular skills, and those who needed them. Drawing a clear line in the development of a brand - say, Indian, or Harley-Davidson - is always done backwards, and after the fact, and often leaves out important parts of the story in favor of a clear narrative.
TheVintagent is pleased to include the research of Ken Aiken on the very early years of Indian, with its complicated web of influences and connections. Ken has dismantled assumptions and myths surrounding the creation of the company, in favor of what he could actually find in the historical record. His research is presented in 3 parts, and ends with as many questions as it answers, which only proves History is a living, evolving discipline, and taking a hard look at what's 'known' is always worth the effort. Ken's series is reproduced here by his kind permission.
George M. Hendee, Bicycle Race Legend
“I realized that in the name Indian we had a winner for bicycles. When the motorcycle came along a year or so later, it simply was out of the question to think of calling it anything but Indian. The name fitted the motorcycle even better than it did the bicycle, and before many moons had passed, the new warrior had deposed the Old Chief from the Wigwam.” —George Hendee, speech made before the Springfield Rotary Club in 1931
Popular history has the iconic Indian Motocycle Company starting in 1901 with the fortuitous partnership of Carl Oscar Hedstrom and George M. Hendee. In reality, the company that manufactured the motorcycle wouldn’t assume its popular name until November 1923. Before that it was known as the Hendee Manufacturing Co. and its first product was a bicycle. Yet the story actually begins two decades before that and reflects the transition that took place in America as bicycles morphed into motorcycles.
In 1879 Albert Pope imported 50 high-wheel bicycles from England and three years later had acquired the Weed Sewing Machine Company—the foremost machine tool and forging factory in America—to manufacture his Columbia bicycles. The 1880s experienced its first bicycle craze, which included the formation of local clubs, a national organization, long-distance touring and racing competitions. With a 1:1 pedal-to-wheel ratio and the diameter of the huge front wheel reaching up to five feet, these high-wheel bicycles required athletic strength and stamina to operate on competitive levels. From 1882 through 1886 the National Amateur High Wheel Champion was George Hendee and the speed record he established in 1886 wouldn’t be broken until 1892.
George Mallory Hendee with one of his Silver King bicycles in the 1890s.
America’s second bicycle craze came after the arrival of the safety or “ordinary” bicycle. The Overman Wheel Co. was the first to introduce this new design where the two wheels were not only smaller, but also the same size, and the new crank and chain allowed for more efficient—and faster—propulsion. The ordinary didn’t require athletic strength to operate: ladies and more dignified gentlemen now could respectably enjoy bicycling. In 1897 American industry would manufacture two million bicycles, or one for every 30 people in the U.S.A., and bicycle racing would become the most popular sport in America with over 600 professional racers on the circuit. One of these was Carl Oscar Hedstrom.
An Aster motor from 1900, as used in the very first American motorcycles, like the Orient.
It was announced in January 1892 that George M. Hendee was managing the bicycle floor of the Hulbert Brothers store that sells King and Queen of Scorchers bicycles. He was a racing legend and, although past his prime, still entered bicycle races. In March 1893, Hendee became the New England agent for Rudge, Sylph, and Overland bicycles. In July he was offered the presidency of Warwick Cycles, but declined. That year he also participated at the Springfield track as a judge and timer. In mid January of 1894 he sailed for England where he apparently made arrangements with suppliers of bicycle components. By December he had completed his models of the Silver King and announced an installment program that was to begin on January 1, 1895. The first Silver King bicycle ad appeared in the January 4 issue of The Wheel. George Hendee made Silver King bicycles to order at his shop in the Stacy building at 41-43 Taylor Street in Springfield, Massachusetts, using parts imported from England. (At this time the Duryea automobile was being produced on the third floor of this building.) On November 23, 1895, Hendee sold half interest to Eddie Nelson, who had been working with him for the past year, and the business acquired a $10,000 loan from Nelson’s father-in-law, Mr. Holbrook. Hendee & Nelson Manufacturing Co. was formed and the shop expanded to include 10,000 sq. ft. on two floors at 478 Main Street.
At this time there were two U.S. Patent Offices, one for bicycle-related inventions and one for everything else. Between 1890 and 1896, over $100 million had been spent on bicycles and fortunes were made in stock speculation of existing businesses; by the end of 1896 there were 300 bicycle manufacturing companies in the U.S. Wooden board-track velodromes across the country hosted events at which thousands of spectators attended. Bicyclists also were taking touring trips and railways advertised popular destinations for cycling tourists. The League of American Wheelmen (LAW) had over 100,000 members and actively lobbied Congress to support the Good Roads Movement.
The R.M. Keating Motor Bicycle patent of June 4th, 1901. Keating's workshop was in Middletown, CT, in the same neighborhood as Oscar Hedstrom's workshop as he developed the first Indian prototype in 1901. Keating's machine was finished - and patented - first, and Keating sued both Indian and Harley-Davidson for patent infringement. He won both cases!
In March 1897 a legal notice was published in The Wheel: “The Hendee & Nelson Mfg. Co., 478 Main St, Springfield, Mass. will hereafter be known as E. H. Nelson & Co. Mr. Hendee will devote more of his time to the factory on Taylor Street.” On August 18, an attachment was levied by the court and all of the company’s assets were seized: the following month Hendee & Nelson Mfg. filed for insolvency. Like so many other bicycle companies, it failed because the market was glutted with over-produced inventory and cutthroat competition had slashed retail prices to the bone. However, George Hendee had an extensive family, business and industry network. He acquired the tools and inventory of his former company at auction, raised $5,000, and incorporated the Hendee Manufacturing Company in January 1898. His new line of bicycles was called Indian.
Carl Oscar Hedstrom with the very first Indian prototype, built in a rented workshop in Middletown, Connecticut. The tool room of the Worcester Cycle M'fr Co on 24 Hamlin St, leased for $1/day, including power and tools. The prototype was completed in early May 1901, so this photo was likely taken in March or April 1901.
Using parts imported from England and retailing his product at less than half the price of his competitors, George Hendee was selling 4,000 bicycles a year. However, the bicycle industry was in serious trouble. Albert Pope had managed to consolidate 73 different manufacturers into a trust called the American Bicycle Company, while numerous others—including Worcester Cycle Mfg.—declared bankruptcy or were forced to reorganize. Charles Metz’s Waltham Mfg, (Orient bicycles) became the exclusive American agency for the Aster motor in March 1900, the Orient Autogo tricycle—that with a fore-car attachment converted into the Autogo Quad—came out in April, the Victoriette Phaeton automobile was introduced in August, and the Orient Autogo cycle became available for sale by October. E.R. Thomas introduced their Auto-Bi motor cycle in 1900; so did the Marsh brothers, George Holley, and W. E. Steffey. The Cleveland Motor Tricycle came out in September and Keating’s motor bicycle was road tested by the press in December. In Springfield, where the Duryea brothers had established the first automobile factory in America in 1895, the Knox Automobile was offering their three-wheel carriage for sale, and the Hampden Mfg Co. was producing motors for bicycles. Hendee was an astute businessman and no doubt aware of whom was doing what and where the industry was headed.
Grand Prix Racing and Wall of Death at San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition, 1915
In a rollicking, anything-goes city like San Francisco, it was still possible in 1915 to wow crowds by the hundreds of thousands with an old-fashioned spectacle. The City had emerged phoenix-like from the rubble of its tremendous shaking in 1906, and City fathers decided the 1913 completion of the Panama Canal was a good excuse for an Exposition to show off the newly rebuilt city. Mayor ‘Sunny’ Jim Rolph loved a party; he was a wealthy, debauched populist who owned two banks, a shipping line, and a whorehouse. He grasped the upside of not only building such an Expo, but also developing the land beneath it once the show was pulled down. The site chosen was the Harbor View area, a reclaimed marshland then hosting a tent city of ‘quake refugees, whose 635 acres were purchased for $1,036,440.78. Today it’s called the Marina district, and is both vulnerable to earthquake (being landfill) and very popular with SF’s burgeoning tech-yuppie influx.
A swamp and squatter's camp transformed into the Jewel City for a year, before being torn down almost entirely (Bernard Maybeck's Palace of Fine Arts is still a huge tourist draw) and converted into the high-rent Marina district.
A shimmering fantasy village – the ‘Jewel City’ - was erected in less than a year atop the former squatter’s camp, with dramatic, radical architecture at its core, a final flowering of 19th Century Beaux Arts beauty. The Panama Pacific International Exhibition (PPIE) was a carefully color-coordinated series of soft travertine pinks and ochres, its paths packed with the white sand from Monterey, which was fire-roasted to the right shade of brown. The heart of a central district of domes and towers was the Palace of Jewels, covered with 102,000 multicolored Czech cut-glass Novagems hung on wires and backed by mirrors, so they could swing and sparkle in the constant Bay breezes while illuminated by 50 arc lights. The nearby Rainbow Scintillator was a novelty, the first use of searchlights for entertainment, with a cadre of Marine Corps regulars manning 48 colored searchlamps in tight drill patterns, projected to the sky on clouds of steam (or frequently fog) from a stationary locomotive which had been painted to look like marble.
Like nothing most folks had ever seen - colored light shimmering through cut Czech glass at night
Amongst the dozens of spectacular grand halls, reflecting lakes and promenades were two racetracks; one for horses, the other for cars. It was intended from the start that the popular International Grand Prize and Vanderbilt Cup races would be held at the PPIE, and the course incorporated the roads of the Expo with an extension loop into the Presidio, atop undeveloped marshland (Crissy Field). Here the track was constructed from wood directly over the sodden earth, before it joined solid ground again within the Expo proper. Three grandstands were constructed for a total of $47,353, capable of seating 25,900 people, with the top seats 41’ above the track surface. The top of the grandstands were decorated with flags and bunting, and canvas awnings protected spectators from the rain. Athletic quarters were built under the stands, as were offices for the track officials, even living quarters for the athletic managers, nicely finished with plaster walls and steam heat. A 4-story judge’s stand stood at the start/finish line; with the top floor for judges, the 3rd floor the timers, and the 2nd for telegraph stations and journalists, all with open walls for an excellent view. Two score boards of 12’ x 30’ capped the roof, angled for a clear view for all spectators.
The Start/Finish line at the PPIE, with the grandstands clearly shown [San Francisco Public Library]The International Grand Prize was the first race of the 1915 season, and was flagged off by Fred J. Wagner at 10:30am on Feb 27 1915. While 39 cars had entered, in the end only 30 cars raced in the rain, which continued all day, and was hell on the board track. The remainder of the course was hardly better, snaking dangerously between the huge exhibit buildings with their 70’ high walls. As the cars passed from the paved surface in the Expo to the wilds of Crissy Field, the change to wooden boards over the marshy grounds, combined with the rain, meant a spectacular display of rainwater geysering between the boards as each car passed - a muddy fanfare spectacular for the crowd of 65,000 people hovering beneath umbrellas, but unpleasant for any closely-following drivers. The track bent between the Palace of Mines and Metallurgy and the Palace of Varied Industries, where haybales were stacked to catch the many skidding racers. In the Vanderbilt Cup race, drivers began using the bales to actually carom around the corners, to occasionally disastrous result.
'Baron' Eddie Rickenbacker, WW1 ace pilot and ace Grand Prix driver as well
‘Baron’ Eddie Rickenbacker would become the most famous entrant in the Grand Prize, although he would shortly drop the faux title and the ‘h’ for a less Germanic-sounding ‘k’ (‘to take the Hun out of my name’). The ignition wires of his Maxwell were swamped in the rain after 41 laps. None in the Maxwell team (Barney Oldfield and Bill Carlson) did any better, which rubbed salt in a wound; Rickenbacher had only just signed on with Maxwell, as his previous car, the remarkable 1914 Peugeot EX3, had given trouble in his previous two races. That very car was given to Anglo-Italian driver Dario Resta, and Rickenbacher soon regretted the swap, considering the switch to Maxwell the biggest mistake of his career. He made up for all this two years later, earning the Croix de Guerre and Légion d’Honneur as the ‘Ace of Aces’ in France, flying Nieuports and SPAD XIIIs like a racing driver, with 26 confirmed kills.
As race courses go, it's hard to beat the architecture of the PPIE for grandeur.
Regardless of the rain and relatively slow track, the Grand Prize was spectacular. Observers ‘watched the muddy champions of this modern tournament thunder by, through avenues of dripping palms, under the calm, travertine scrutiny of Cortez and Pizarro, who never got up more speed than 12mph in their somewhat important lives.’ The race was finished by 6pm, in gathering darkness, by which time ‘everybody had enough’. 104 laps of the course made 400.29 miles, and almost 8 hours later, Dario ‘Dolly’ Resta had won his first race in America, driving the revolutionary Peugeot EX3 at an average speed of 56.13mph, winning $3000 in the process.
Dario 'Dolly' Resta and his victorious Peugeot racer, which ultimately formed the basis of the Miller / Offenhauser engine, and an Indianapolis 500 dynasty.
Resta was followed 6.5 minutes later by Howard ‘Howdy’ Wilcox in his Stutz, which netted him $2000. There were only 11 cars still circulating, battling valiantly for 3rd place (and $1500) under the electric lights of the elegant Avenue of Palms, the Esplanade, and the board track. Hughie Hughes emerged next with his ‘Ono’ special, a Fiat chassis with Pope motor. Fourth went to Gil Anderson in another Stutz ($1000), and 5th to Louis Disbrow in a Simplex ($500 prize). A summary of the Expo explained, ‘We note the names of these cars not to advertise them gratuitously, but because they may be of interest 10 years hence.’ Or even one hundred years! After these gents came in, the race was stopped and the remaining 6 drivers called in, no doubt to their relief. The slippery race had surprisingly few mishaps, which were related thus: ‘A wheel was broken, a tire flew off, a car went through the rail, several others skidded into the baled hay, and a dog was killed. Nobody was hurt, but the crowd lived the rainy hours in constant apprehension, which is what a crowd likes to do.’
The rain did come - perhaps surprising in these drought-prone days.
Because of poor weather, the Vanderbilt Cup was postponed to March 6, and was a much shorter event of 300 miles/77 laps. The day dawned bright and sunny, and the crowd had swelled to over 100,000 by the 12:30 start time. The lineup for the Cup was nearly identical to the GP, although drivers Cooper and Taylor were out, while T.A. Tomasini, Harold Hall, and ‘Wild Bob’ Burman were added, giving a total of 31 cars. Drivers were flagged 3 abreast at 15-second intervals, and Ralph DePalma with his 1913 Mercedes burst into the lead. That didn’t last long, as his car was plagued with vibration, and Eddie Rickenbacher surged ahead for the next 6 laps in his Mercer, until he broke a fuel line. The Deusenberg of Tom Alley held the lead until lap 20, when Dolly Resta passed him, with Tom Pullen in the second Mercer right on his tail. Resta was the only the foreigner in the race, and as yet unknown to fans, so when Pullen passed him on lap 23 the crowd was thrilled. By lap 30, though, Resta had secured top spot again, and ‘Wild’ Bob Burman in his Case passed Pullen too.
The winners lined up outside a suitably grand colonnade of the PPIE.
As the track was dry, speeds were up, as were accidents, including one car that passed the grandstands engulfed in flames – just the thing to build a fan base! The first mishaps were courtesy the Deusenberg camp, as Tom Alley mowed down 150’ of fencing on lap 37, while Eddie O’Donnell sideswiped a haybale and slid his car on its side – luckily neither driver was hurt. On lap 40, Harvey ‘Captain’ Kennedy lost a wheel from his Edwards Special, which struck and injured a spectator, as they do. Not long after, ‘Wild’ Bob Burman made a display of his Case racer outside the Palace Of Machinery, rolling the car and breaking his mechanic’s thigh and a couple of ribs. Inside that very Palace, Henry Ford had set up a complete Model T production plant, and new cars rolled off an assembly line every few minutes.
Champion driver Bob Burman, who could be credited with founding the Offenhauser line.
Bob Burman was a pivotal figure in American racing; after wrecking his Case, he secured a Peugeot for the remaining 1915 season, but broke the crankshaft in the Point Loma race (San Diego). Despairing, Burman gave designer Harry Miller and machinist Fred Offenhauser $2000 to modify the DOHC, 4-valve Peugeot engine, which needed shrinking to fit the new 5-liter formula for the Indy 500. The engine was transformed with Miller-designed light alloy cylinder/heads, tubular rods, a pressurized oiling system, stronger crank, and 293 cu” displacement – and the Miller/Offenhauser engine dynasty was born. And after lopping 200lbs from the chassis, Burman lapped the Peugeot factory team cars at Indy.
Harry Grant and his Stutz racer, who made 17th place.
Harry Grant’s Vanderbilt Cup race was a less dramatic, but more frustrating affair, as on lap 50, his pit crew watered his fuel tank, and fueled his radiator. The Mercers were the best American team, constantly dogging Resta, but Glover Ruckstall broke an axle on lap 72, while Pullen, having run 2nd for half the race, had to stop and secure a loose fuel tank, which cost him a place as ‘Howdy’ Wilcox snuck past, and retained his lead, making the 1-2 finishing order of the Vanderbilt Cup the same as the Grand Prix. Pullen settled for 3rd, and Ralph DePalma 4th in his 140hp Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix. He had won the Vanderbilt Cup twice before, and purchased his Mercedes directly from Paul Daimler at the factory in Untertürkheim, paying $6000. When the car was ready on July 24th 1914, Daimler gave him the car’s documents and a map to the Antwerp docks, telling him to leave immediately; he shipped the car on the German steamer ‘Olympic’, and took a passenger liner from Le Havre, learning mid-voyage that war had broken out. While he didn’t win the Vanderbilt Cup, he did win the Indy 500 later that year with the Mercedes, several laps after breaking a connecting rod!
Jim Parsons in his home-built Parsons car before the race.
Dario Resta won the 300-mile Vanderbilt Cup in 4hrs, 27 minutes, 37 seconds, at an average speed of 66.25mph. He also won a second $3000 prize, plus bonuses (eg, Bosch gave him $400), and was clearly king of the course - wet or dry. While the PPIE track didn’t exist a year later, it was the first time a driver had won both the Grand Prix and Vanderbilt Cups. He’d exhibited great chivalry in stopping to check on Burman’s flipped car mid-race, and must have had quite a bit in hand to do so and still win by 7 minutes. The actual Vanderbilt Cup was made of silver by Tiffany’s, and was worth a cool $5000, as was the smaller but solid gold cup for the Grand Prix. Racing at this level was a rich man’s game, and hardly profitable, but Dolly Resta had earned enough for an upgrade, and promptly bought a new Peugeot EX5 for the rest of the 1915 season.
The bally outside the Race for Life, showing the 1914 Indian racer used on the Wall of Death inside [San Francisco Public Library]The PPIE drew well over 18 million visitors in 10 months, with several other auto and motorcycle features, including what is perhaps the first ‘wall of death’. Built for cars and motorcycles, the concession within The Zone (or funfair) was called the ‘Race for Life’. Fully vertical tracks appeared at carnivals by the early 1900s with bicyclist daredevils, but motoring in a barrel was new, and certainly worth the $0.10 admission. The motorcycles were very fast c.1914 Indian and Excelsior board track racers, fully capable of 100mph, while the cars appear to be recently obsolete Stutz racers with military wheels, also far too powerful for the 40’ diameter of the barrel. The mechanical overkill reflected insecurity about this new sport, but no doubt made for very exciting spectating. A sign on the entry read ‘100 Miles Per Hour - Time It!’ which was of course impossible, but such close proximity to a vertically speeding racer feels like ‘the ton’ even today.
The Indian in use in what was possibly the first fully vertical wall of death, called the Race for Life [San Francisco Public Library]The PPIE closed on December 5th, 1915, and its grand palaces were quickly demolished. Only Bernard Maybeck’s masterpiece, the Palace of Fine Arts, remained in place after a popular outcry; its fantasy colonnade, muses, giant urns, and lovely dome are the gems of the Marina district. Nobody remembers the packs of smoking, bellowing race cars that once raced around it, but jittery films on YouTube record the never-equaled spectacle of racing around the Rainbow Scintillator.
Joe Hall using an Excelsior board track racer on the vertical wall at the Race for Life [San Francisco Public Library]Visitors to the PPIE included Effie Hotchkiss and her mother, who were the first women to ride a motorcycle across the USAA Dayton motorcycle and sidecar: a Dayton display was included in the Palace of Industry
The Excelsior display in the Palace of Industry at the PPIE [San Francisco Public Library]This article originally appeared in The Automobile magazine, the finest vintage car mag in the world!
While assembling the motorcycles for historic 'Art of the Motorcycle' exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, curator Ultan Guilfoyle reached out to to historians and collectors around the world for historic and beautiful motorcycles. Such a collection, spanning 150 years of motorcycle history, had never been assembled before, and word did get around among the moto-cognoscenti, and occasionally Ultan was contacted by individuals offering unique machines. One of those individuals was Jeanne-Claude, the wrap-artist with her husband Christo, who create large-scale wrapped landscape works. The pair had always created smaller, salable artworks as well, and fund their enormous projects by the sale of prints and scraps of material used in their sculptures.
I recently interviewed Ultan Guilfoyle about the Art of the Motorcycle exhibit, and he recounted this gem about the famous sculpting duo:
"One day I got a call from Jean-Claude, ‘Is this the Walton Gulfooly fellow?’
Yes, I said.
‘This is Jean-Claude, I hear you are having an exhibit of motorcycles. We have a Vespa.'
Very interesting: what year is it?
'1958'
Fantastic, that's a really early one. Where is it, and what color is it?
‘I don't know what color. It’s in my living room, come look at it.’
So I stopped by their studio in NYC, and their assistant let me in: the Vespa was covered in cloth! I asked the assistant if I could peek in - I was trying to sort what color! Of course she said no. I spoke to Jeanne-Claude on the phone while I was there, and suggested we needed to unwrap their Vespa for the exhibit.
‘How dare you! You insult the history of our work! This is a very important piece!’
She called Thomas Krens, the director of the Guggenheim, who punted and said 'anything Ultan wants to do is okay'. Jeanne-Claude called back, and I repeated that we'd love to have their Vespa, but we’d have to unwrap it.
'You are an outrage!' and she slammed down the phone.
The Guggenheim was thinking about doing an exhibit of their work, and I next saw them during their Central Park exhibit, the gates, and introduced myself. Jeanne-Claude said, ‘You’re not that motorcycle guy are you! You’re a disgrace!"
Every picture may tell a story, but some pictures need a novel. In this instance, that novel has been recently written, 'The Silences of Hammerstein' (Hans Magnus Enzesberger, 2009), part biography and part speculative fiction, an effort to grapple with a particularly puzzling, heroic, and frustrating chapter of German history. The charming young woman pictured in 1933 aboard her motorcycle is Marie Therese von Hammerstein, whose father, Kurt von Hammerstein, happened to be head of the Reichswehr (German army) at the end of the Weimar Republic, just before Hitler's rise to power.
Marie Therese von Hammerstein in 1933
Whatever stereotypes or prejudices her parentage might conjure would be entirely misplaced; Kurt von Hammerstein was a fascinating character, a man of strong opinions and succinct words, a friend of progressive trade unions, an aristocrat, and an outspoken opponent of Adolf Hitler. He also praised laziness in intelligent men, feeling that such fellows bring 'clarity of mind and strong nerves to make difficult decisions'. He parented a large brood of remarkable, strong-willed, and free-minded children, all of whom made, or attempted to make, their mark on German history.
The three von Hammerstein's daughters (there were two brothers as well): Marie-Therese, Marie-Louise, and Helga.
Marie Therese was clearly such. The mere fact of an aristocratic woman riding a motorcycle in 1933 is exemplary, but with such a father, her motorcycle became a tool for an entirely more serious purpose. That General von Hammerstein survived Hitler's rise to power is remarkable, especially as he made no secret of his hatred of Hitler, and attempted to lure the Fuhrer to his fortified compound in Cologne to kill him. Hitler demurred every time. As Hammerstein learned of Nazi plans to arrest and kill Jews, he supplied Marie Therese with the names of the targeted, and she rode her motorcycle as far afield as Prague (still independent) to ferry Jewish intellectuals to safety. One plucky duck.
Kurt von Hammerstein, head of the Reichswehr until 1934, and outspoken hater of Adolf Hitler
Marie Therese and her two sisters married Jewish intellectuals and labor organizers, and of course all of them had to flee Germany by the mid-1930s. Their father died of cancer in 1943, after being relieved of his military service by 1934. Her two brothers were involved in an attempt to assassinate Hitler on July 20th, 1944, and escaped because they knew a secret passageway used by the military which connected to the U-Bahn (subway). They survived the war. Other siblings had a hard time of it, as after the failed plot, her two younger siblings and their mother were interred in a concentration camp until the end of the war. Marie Therese and her husband John Paasche fled to Japan, as Paasche had studied Asian languages in college. They lived out the war there, 'with the police camped out across the street, watching'. In 1948 they moved to San Francisco, where Marie Therese died in 2000, aged 90.
Apparently the only photo with Hitler and Hammerstein in the same place, in 1934, at the funeral of Edwin Bechstein, whose widow Helene stands left. The Bechstein family firm made pianos, and were big supporters of Hitler in the 1920s.
