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.
