3rd Year Special Annual Double Issue Vol 4 Issue 1 & 2 Jan - Apr 2 3rd Year Special Annual Double Issue Vol 4 Issue | Page 66

ADVENTURE & WILDLIFE
A History of the Motorcycle
1936-Crocker-Hemi-Head-Bonhams
T
he history of the motorcycle begins in the
second half of the 19th century. Motorcycles
are descended from the ‘safety bicycle,’ a
bicycle with front and rear wheels of the same
size and a pedal crank mechanism to drive the
rear wheel. Despite some early landmarks in its
development, the motorcycle lacks a rigid
pedigree that can be traced back to a single
idea
or
machine.
Instead,
the
idea
seems
to
have
occurred
to
numerous engineers and inventors around Europe
at around the same time.
Early Steam-Powered Cycles
In the 1860s Pierre Michaux, a blacksmith in
Paris, founded ‘Michaux et Cie’ (Michaux and
Company), the first company to construct
bicycles with pedals called a velocipede at the
time, or ‘Michauline’. The first steam powered
motorcycle,
the
Michaux-Perreaux
steam
velocipede, can be traced to 1867, when Pierre’s
son Ernest Michaux fitted a small steam engine
to one of the ‘velocipedes’. The design went to
America when Pierre Lallement, a Michaux
employee who also claimed to have developed
the prototype in 1863, filed for the first bicycle
patent with the US patent office in 1866. In
66
1868 an American, Sylvester H. Roper of
Roxbury, Massachusetts, developed a twin-
cylinder steam velocipede, with a coal-fired boiler
between the wheels. Roper’s contribution to
motorcycle development ended suddenly when
he died demonstrating one of his machines in
Cambridge, Massachusetts on June 1, 1896.
Also in 1868, a French engineer Louis-Guillaume
Perreaux patented a similar steam powered single
cylinder
machine,
the
Michaux-Perreaux
steam velocipede, with an alcohol burner and
twin belt drives, which was possibly invented
independently of Roper’s. Although the patent is
dated 1868, nothing indicates the invention had
been operable before 1871.
In 1881, Lucius Copeland of Phoenix, Arizona
designed a much smaller steam boiler which
could drive the large rear wheel of an American
Star high-wheeler at 12 mph. In 1887 Copeland
formed the Northrop Manufacturing Co. to
produce the first successful ‘Moto-Cycle’
(actually a three-wheeler).
Experimentation and invention
The very first commercial design for a self-
Vol 4 | Issue 2 |Mar - Apr 2019