Everything is evolving or dying, and motorcycles are no exception. This post goes over some technological breakthroughs that made the motorcycle we know today, from something that resemble with a bicycle.
Albert Einstein said "Imagination is more important than knowledge", and it proved to be true over the years. Every time a major improvement was made in the motorcycle world, there was a man with great vision behind it. His imagination and faith in success overcome the limited ideas of his time.
The conception of the first motorcycle ever made, may be very well forgotten in time. Even the ones that are recorded and we know about them, are disputed by historians. There were several inventions that resembled with the modern motorcycle and yet very different.
First recorded inventor was an american called Sylvester Howard Roper. In 1867 or 1868 he put a two piston steam powered engine on a bicycle. This marks the beginning of the 2 wheels engine powered vehicles as we have know from writer Allan Girdler. In time, Roper, perfected his invention and, in 1896 at age of 73 he reached 64 km/h riding his motorcycle on a bicycle track. Sadly he felt and died afterwords. Although doctors said that he died from a hard attack before falling, his invention was seen as too dangerous for ridding many yeas to come.
This kind of inventions would blow your mind if you lived in that era.
Tech Geek is a nice website where you can see a great deal of cool tech stuff that have been invented over the years.
Next step was the invention of gas powered engine. This was done in Germany in 1885, this time by 2 men: Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach. It had and an Otto-cycle engine producing about 1/2 horse power.
From there, were only 9 years until the first motorcycle available to the public for purchase: Hildebrand & Wolfmüller.
Indian Motocycle Manufacturing Company was founded by two former bicycle racers in 1901 in US. They designed the "diamond frame", but most notably in 1903 they made the first V-twin engine for motorcycle. This engine was more relayble and get more power for less engine parts. This means the engine was lighter and more cheap to produce.
Now the motorcycle concept has evolved so much, that you can no longer speak about them as a single concept.There are many types of motorbikes, each design for specific type of riding: supersport, crusers, touring, naked, dirt and so on.
Motorcycles came a long way from their birth and i'm sure they will go much more further in years to come.
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