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First
Two Wheeler
The
first popular two-wheelers...
Most of the development during this earliest of eras concentrated on three
and four-wheeled designs, since it was complex enough to get the machines
running without having to worry about them falling over. The next really
notable two-wheeler was the Millet of 1892. It used a 5-cylinder engine
built as the hub of its rear wheel. The cylinders rotated with the wheel,
and its crankshaft constituted the rear axle.
The first really successful production two-wheeler though, was the
Hildebrand & Wolfmueller, patented in Munich in 1894. It had a
step-through frame, with its fuel tank mounted on the downtube. The engine
was a parallel twin, mounted low on the frame, with its cylinders going
fore-and-aft. The connecting rods connected directly to a crank on the rear
axle, and instead of using heavy flywheels for energy storage between
cylinder-firing, it used a pair of stout elastic bands, one on each side
outboard of the cylinders, to help out on the compression strokes. It was
water-cooled, and had a water tank/radiator built into the top of the rear
fender.
In 1895, the French firm of DeDion-Buton built an engine that was to make
the mass production and common use of motorcycles possible. It was a small,
light, high revving four-stroke single, and used battery-and-coil ignition,
doing away with the troublesome hot-tube. Bore and stroke figures of 50mm by
70mm gave a displacement of 138cc. A total loss lubrication system was
employed to drip oil into the crankcase through a metering valve, which then
sloshed around to lubricate and cool components before dumping it on the
ground via a breather.
DeDion-Buton used this 1/2 horsepower powerplant in roadgoing trikes, but
the engine was copied and used by everybody, including Indian and
Harley-Davidson in the U.S. Although a gentleman named Pennington built some
machines around 1895 (it's uncertain whether any of them actually ran), the
first US production motorcycle was the Orient-Aster, built by the Metz
Company in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1898. It used an Aster engine that was
a French-built copy of the DeDion-Buton, and predated Indian (1901) by three
years, and Harley-Davidson (1902) by four |
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