The first motorcycles in history

First it was the bike, and then the bike. And of course, the original motorcycle was no more than a motor bike. It is not the day before yesterday, since we have to go back to a Sunday in April 1818 to see the vélocipédraisiavaporiana in action. Under this name hides a bicycle driven by a steam boiler that walked through the Jardin de Luxembourg in Paris and is the first version of motorcycle of which one has news. These basic data and just a drawing, but it is already something of a trace.

Experiments of this type, that is, the incorporation of steam engines to bicycles and the like, continued. In 1855 it was a certain Heinrich Hildebrand who took the trouble to advance in the inventive career. In 1869 there was another attempt, in this case more successful, despite the fact that the result was a slow and unreliable device.

And so we come to what we could really call the first motorcycle in history. It was designed by the Michaux brothers, bicycle manufacturers, together with an engineer named Perreaux. It was a steam motorcycle, a cylinder and rear-wheel drive. Little by little, a mechanic named Huret was perfecting the work and in 1879 he had finished a motorized tricycle that at twenty kilometers per hour was capable of walking about sixty kilometers.

In the 79th of that 19th century an Italian, Murnigotti, changed the steam engine for one of combustion and patented the vehicle, with two wheels and a four-stroke engine of a horsepower. Unfortunately, it was never manufactured and therefore it was left without the real precursor medal of the bike.

And after all this, officially (more or less) the title of inventors of the motorcycle is assigned to some Germans: Wilhelm Maybach and Gottlieb Daimler. It was 1885 and that gossip, made of wood, was made. The photo of the start of the entrance is a reproduction of that Maybach and Daimler motorcycle. It was not very fast, nor beautiful, nor reliable, but it was a motorcycle.