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The motorcycle may not be the leader of the pack when it comes to transport around the world, but that doesn't mean it hasn't had cultural significance.
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Welcome to the Throttle Roast podcast. I'm your host, Niels Meersschaert. Last week we talked about seven of the most iconic motorcycle brands that still produce bikes today. And this week, I want to dive into some more of the history and cultural significance of the motorcycle.
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So let's start off with a very simple definition of what is a motorcycle. Well, today we typically think of this as a vehicle that has two wheels.
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Typically, the rear wheel is driven by a belt, a driveshaft, or most commonly a chain. And the front wheel can be turned and the bike leans into turns.
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The left hand controls the clutch while the right controls the front brake and throttle.
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And the right foot controls the rear brake. And the left foot shifts gears. Usually these are gasoline powered internal combustion engines as the powertrain. Although there are some electric power trains, typically with batteries that are available today.
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But the first motorcycles didn't have these characteristics. In fact, the very first motorcycles were actually called velocipedes. And they had steam power and these had the front wheel locked into position. So just like we talked about last week, you had to physically lift the front of the bike in order to change your direction. And the first steam powered bikes were actually built around the same time, one by Michaux-Perreaux in France, and the other one was Sylvester Rober in Massachusetts around 1867. So we did get a very, very early start when it came to motorcycles. And in 1876, the Safety Bicycle Incorporated many elements that we now think of for motorcycles, including a chain driven crank and a front fork with a caster angle there to add stability. Now, the first internal combustion engine motorcycle was still based on the bicycle. and the very first one was created by Gottlieb, Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach. And it was the first internal combustion engine motorcycle built in 1885. It didn't have the steering angle we typically associate with bicycles and motorcycles, but in fact had a zero degree head angle. It had to rely on outrigger wheels, almost like the training wheels on a kid's bike in order to maintain it. And it really wasn't designed to be a practical vehicle. Instead, it was a test mule for a new engine that they were developing. It wasn't until 1895 that a motorcycle was mass produced by Hildebrand and Wolf Muller, and it was the first one to actually be called a motorcycle in the U.S. Charles Metz built the first production motorcycle in 1898 in Massachusetts. And, of course, many of the brands that we covered in our episode on iconic motorcycle brands got their start in the early 1900s with Royal Enfield Indian Motorcycle Triumph, Harley-Davidson, all starting between 1901 and 1903. And while those brands had become iconic, there were many brands which started up and died, including Norton Douglas Motorcycle and others in these early years. And most bikes at the time were essentially that safety bicycle design with an engine mounted in the frame near the crank. They didn't have suspension as a consequence because they really were bicycles with a motor strapped in. And the controls varied a lot, with some bikes having handlebar controlled throttle, handlebar controlled spark, hand shifters, foot clutch. And it was inconsistent on the side. So they were they were a mishmash of how you would be able to control it. But as engine size and power increased, the need for a differentiated design became clear. Both to support the larger engines but also the higher speed that the new motorcycle was capable of achieving versus the safety bicycle. And by the 1920s, the first motorcycle to exceed 100 miles an hour was created using a 350 CC engine.
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Now, of course, at the same time the car was gaining in popularity, Henry Ford's assembly line helped dramatically reduce the cost of cars, making them affordable for many more people. And compared to other motor vehicles, the single track nature of a two wheeled vehicle had different dynamics than four wheeled competitors. The loss of the two wheels and the more limited passenger and cargo spaces aided them in leveraging smaller capacity engines and lower weight, which resulted in better fuel economy. In fact, a fully faired Honda XL 125 achieved 470 miles per gallon on real highways, just showing how much economy is possible with motorcycles. Now being a single track vehicle. Motorcycles have a unique handling and balance characteristic. With the wheels spinning, it does help create some gyroscopic effect to stabilize the bike in an upright position. But at slows speeds, the bike can easily fall to either side and turning is more similar to flying. You need to lean the bike in order to turn.
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Now, while some riders will argue this point, you turn a bike by counter steering when you turn the fork towards your left. The tires grab the road surface and the bike actually leans toward the right. Normally you instinctively recenter the fork and even turn it slightly to the right after the lean has been initialized. most bikes will maintain the turn without further input on the fork. And in fact, you have to induce opposite direction to the fork to recover to an upright position. And while this seems counterintuitive and thus there's the lengthy Internet debates about to you do counter steering or is it natural steering? The same behavior actually happens on bicycles, and we don't really think about it. However, and this is where most people begin to argue when the bike is moving slowly, the bike turns in the direction of the fork. But at those speeds, riders often have their feet on the ground and they're just moving it around in their garage.
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So there's no real opportunity for the bike to lean. And when the bike leans, this is where you start to get some of those changing dynamics. In fact, the wheelbase slightly changes as you do that Now it's too much to get into with a podcast episode, but fork geometry, tyre shape and rider position all play a role in these dynamics. In general, a steeper fork angle like those found in a sport bike is quicker to change direction and get into the lean, while a slacker fork angle like one found on a cruiser is more stable in a straight line and it self-corrects for minor fork angle changes. Suffice it to say there's a lot more going on in a bike than a car. And it's why it's generally harder to ride a motorcycle than to drive a car.
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course, another dynamic that we have within motorcycles is the short wheelbase. and when we think of that relative to cars combined with plenty of engine torque, this allows motorcycles to actually pop a wheelie where the rear wheel stays on the ground. But the front wheel hovers above the ground and very strong brakes, at least in the front. Combined with that, short wheelbase allow the opposite behavior of a stoppie where the rear wheel goes up in the air.
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Now, both of these require a good amount of skill and balance from the rider, and wheelies often are using the rear brake to keep them going too far. So all of your throttle and your braking is happening on that rear wheel, and that's how you can keep it into an equilibrium to maintain a specific angle that you want the front wheel up stop is of course require precise braking modulation to keep from going too far over the front of the bike and thus smacking into your head. And these dynamics are what make motorcycles unique and why many riders actually really are attracted to doing it because it is such a different behavior than you find on a car and becoming proficient in it is actually part of the draw and the appeal and it has a more dynamic feeling than you would have in a car. You're moving around on the bike. The bike is leaning. All of these contribute to making the bike more appealing.
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But of course we have to think of suspension. And as I mentioned, most of those early bikes were fundamentally bicycles and as such, they didn't have suspension. And some of the early efforts to bring suspension on to motorcycles had some interesting dynamics to them. So, for example, in the early days, adding a trailing link fork to the front wheel allowed it to be sprung. And this was used by both BMW and Indian on some of their early motorcycles. But most of the bikes lacked rear suspension.
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And if you think of it, it actually makes sense. The challenge was the drive train was powering those rear wheels and being able to manage the dynamics of how you would have the powertrain still be able to get to there and have it moving around on you was a bit of a challenge for some of the early engineering of motorcycles. So what we actually ended up doing was many times these had sprung seats. So imagine your saddle that you were sitting on, just had a couple of springs underneath it and that was providing the suspension, at least from the rider's perspective, for the rear of the bike. And if you had suspension on the front of the bike combined with these sprung seats, it did make it able to adapt to some of the various undulations and bumps and cracks in the roads to make it a little bit more comfortable for you. Now, of course, BMW was the first motorcycle manufacturer to use hydraulically damped telescopic forks with the R 12 and the R 17 in 1935. And today, this type of a design is most commonly the one that you find on motorcycles.
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So BMW really did innovate that and it did change the designs that we have for suspension. And we moved from that early sort of trailing link fork design that you had in the very early parts of motorcycling to that design that we typically think of today.
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Now, there have been a number of other non-conventional steering designs for motorcycles over the years, including many that look quite radical compared to what we think of as a standard design.
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But if you look at most motorcycles, odds are you're going to find that they have a telescopic fork today.
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Now, by the 1950s, streamlining was all the rage in cars, trains and planes and even motorcycles fell into this.
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MotoGuzzi actually went so far as to build their own wind tunnel to improve those designs.
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And many of these designs had a more fully enclosed design. NSU Alongside Moto Guzzi was a pioneer. But with the death of four of their racers between 1954 and 1956 for NSU, they abandoned Grand Prix Racing and by the end of the 1950s FIM, which was the Motor Sport Authority, actually banned fully enclosed fairings due to the safety concerns. And while they were still used for speed runs at Bonneville, streamlining essentially disappeared for most motorcycles. And in the 1970s, bikes around the world standardised to what we today think of with that left hand clutch and that left foot gear originally pioneered by some of the Japanese bikes. And this was really where it became much easier. You had a single set of controls universally across all motorcycles and it made it easier to get onto a new bike and still be able to control it versus the almost wild West era that we had of motorcycles at the very beginning And that's just a quick rundown of some of the early history of motorcycles and how we kind of centered on to the design that we see typically today, we no longer have the streamlined fairings on top of the motorcycles, although there are some fairings on sport bikes, but not to the extreme that you had when I was really fully encompassing the rider, we now have a more standardised type of a control set up with mostly standardised on to hydraulically damped telescopic forks and the design of motorcycles has almost stabilised, if you will. There's not as much radical design in terms of the basic control structure, but when we think of history, the other part that's important for us to consider is the cultural impact of motorcycles. now while originally motorcycles were seen as cost effective mode of transportation and side cars were actually often used to make them a family transport vehicle.
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Many riders today ride for leisure, especially in North America, Japan and Europe and like we talked about in an earlier episode where we examined leisure versus practical riding. Motorcycle culture today doesn't have the same perception globally. So I'm going to speak from more of a North American perspective here, because our culture, when it comes to motorcycling, tends to be a little bit more of the leisure type of lifestyle versus the practicality of day to day commuting or transport that you would have in other parts of the world.
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So if we start to think of some examples of this cultural impact. One of the best ones, of course, is to think of music. And many riders, of course, will have a playlist of their favorite tunes to listen while riding. And there's a few songs Certainly coming into the real heyday of motorcycling in the sixties and seventies, where these were songs actually specifically about motorcycling.
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So I'll kick off with a few examples, and one was The Beach Boys, Their 1964 song, Little Honda, was actually about the Honda motorcycles of that era.
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The Shangri-Las, and in 1965 had Leader of the Pack, which talked about the premise of a motorcyclist who was maybe a little bit more of that rebel and got into a little bit of trouble and actually ended up crashing his bike. Of course, most people know Steppenwolf's 1968 Born to Be Wild. This has been adopted as an anthem by many motorcyclists, especially after it was being featured in the film Easy Rider. Greg Allman's 1970 Midnight Rider was another song that really was about motorcycling. And of course, Meat Loaf's 1979 Bat Out of Hell was about a motorcycle crash. some other styles of music as you got into maybe a little bit more of the metal or hard rock. You had Twisted Sister with their 1983 song Ride to Live, Live to Ride and Bon Jovi's 1986 Wanted Dead or Alive has the singer atop his steel horse. And this really was still fitting into that rebel mindset.
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When we think of how culturally some of the motorcycling was maybe the one percenter type of a club that rebel that that ne'er do well, that was sort of the cultural norm. And there was a little bit of a shift in some other songs, like Joe Satriani had his 1989 song Ride, which tells the story of who just someone who just wants to ride.
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So not all of the songs that were part of this cultural movement were talking about The Rebel, although they were probably still a vast majority of it.
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of course, not every image and cultural norm is only about music. We also have to look at some of the visual media.
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So let's talk about some movies.
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1953, we had The Wild One with Marlon Brando, which we talked about of how this was where he brought his own Triumph motorcycle in. And it actually started to bump up sales of Triumph motorcycles in the United States. 1969, we had Easy Rider with Henry Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson. This is probably one of the most iconic films about motorcycling in the United States, certainly.
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And it really tells the story of these three people just hopping on to a pairs of bikes. One was riding in the passenger spot and just riding and all of the adventures and experiences that they had in that sort of counterculture 1960s era. And in 1971, on Any Sunday was a film that looked at the motorcycle sport of racing and how people experienced that across the country. Of course, maybe getting into a little bit more of the science fiction sort of story. We had the 1991 Terminator two featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger aboard a Harley-Davidson fat boy. This also did sell a ton of those motorcycles in the years that followed.
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course, if we look about not just feature films, but also television, Happy Days had Fonzie riding aboard his Triumph trophy 500. Now, the interesting thing is the actor who portrayed Fonzie, Henry Winkler, actually couldn't ride himself. And so most of the shots were of him just sitting astride it or where they had the sort of the fake movement of him, where it was just a green screen movement behind or even a rear projection to give the impression that he was riding. But he actually never rode the bike. American Chopper on the Discovery Channel featured the Orange County chopper. customisation group in that documentary series that started around 2003 and in 2004 we had long way round and this sort of jumpstarted the adventure motorcycle popularity with that BMW, R1150GS. Of course, this was followed up just a few years later with the 2007 film A Long Way Down, and they returned, but this time riding a pair of R1200GSAs going all the way from John O'Groats up in Scotland down to the southern tip of Africa. And that motorcycle, the R1200GSA, is actually one that I still own. I still ride. It's a great bike.
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But that really spearheaded the adventure motorcycling movement.
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course, there was a TV show, Sons of Anarchy that ran from 2008 to 2014. This was a little bit more of that sort of rebel sort of mindset There was still an attraction to people were were fascinated by those who chose to ride and some of the subculture that surrounded them in 2020, the team that made long way round and long way down, actually returned after almost 13 years to bring Long Way Up.
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and this time they came from the tip of South America heading north to Los Angeles. But this time they were aboard Harley Davidson. So it changed from the BMW that they had had previously.
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But these weren't just any normal Harley-Davidsons. These were the livewire electric motorcycles, So they actually ended up turning to generators along the way. But again, it created a little bit of a introduction to other ways, certainly in a more modern era where you could have motorcyclists.
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And of course, fashion is another area where motorcycling has had an influence. If we think of the typical riding gear, like the leather jacket and boots, they've actually become their own fashion icons and they will wear that style even if they don't ride a motorcycle. So it's really become its own. And this really became common in the 1950s. It was immortalized in TV shows like Happy Days with Fonzie. He was often standing around in his black leather jacket. And, you know, that was his this whole go of him. And if there's one design of a motorcycle jacket that has become its own icon, it's probably the Schott Perfecto.
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originally released in 1928, and Schott was started in 1913 in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City by a pair of brothers originally making raincoats. And this design. That Schott Perfecto was actually worn by Marlon Brando in that 1950s film, The Wild One. And while the Schott factory is no longer in New York City, they're not that far away. They actually are in Union, New Jersey. And they're still making that Schott Perfecto, nearly 100 years since it first came out. now on the other side of the pond, Belstaff is well known for their brown leather jackets and, of course, the infamous waxed cotton jacket with plenty of pockets and often a waist belt that is almost the European icon of riding a motorcycle. And of course, jeans and boots are widely worn by plenty of non riders today, although they are almost the uniform, if you will, of a typical cruiser rider, certainly in the United States. And we cannot ignore the impact of Harley Davidson. And while we mostly think of them as a motorcycle manufacturer, they also have a huge clothing and accessory line. And in addition to all the racks of clothing emblazoned with their logo in all the dealerships, there's actually plenty of regular shops that sell gear with the Harley-Davidson logo. And many non riders will wear these to have some connection to those iconic machines, even if it's just more of a wishful thinking or aspirational aspect. In fact, Harley did so well with having some of this secondary income stream. In 2022. They generated more than $270 million in revenue from clothing and gear sales alone. And that's better than many apparel only brands.
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So we cannot ignore that cultural impact.
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I do want to kind of get the elephant in the room, so to speak, out there, which is there is certainly in the United States, a bit of a gender image when it comes to motorcycle riders. You know, big man sitting there with a motorcycle jacket and jeans and boots and that's who's riding a bike. But there have been female riders since the beginning. In fact, Avis and Effie Hotchkiss were the first women to ride a motorcycle cross-country back in 1915. And Susan Lang completed a long distance solo trip also in 1915. And in fact, she would even pile her three kids into a sidecar rig and was one of the best motorcycle mechanics of the age. course, Dorothy Robinson started one of the first women motorcycle groups called the Motorcycle Maids in 1940, and that group still exists today.
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Beryl Swain was the first solo woman to compete in the Isle of Man TT race back in 1962. And, of course, continue with that racing heritage. We can't ignore Valerie Thompson, who's probably known as the fastest female rider, and she's a ten time land speed record holder. Now, in 1998, about 8% of motorcycle owners were women in the United States. But by 2018, that has grown to as much as 19% of all motorcycle owners. Now, when I was in the Citibeemers in New York City, we had many women in the club and several that had actually achieved Iron Butt Association membership. And this means that they were able to complete over a thousand miles in 24 hours. And these were some of the best riders in our group.
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So don't be surprised if you have some outstanding female riders that are out there. And in fact, if you happen to be passed by someone on another bike, keep an eye out for a sticker on their pannier that says you just got passed by a girl. And it's probably one of those amazing riders that I described that I rode with in the Citibeemers.
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course, there's other opportunities for riders of all sorts to come together. And these gatherings actually allow non riders to see a large number of riders in the same time. And it brings an awareness to the sport. You know, in the United States we have rallies where thousands of motorcyclists gather and they can see that passion that we have for riding.
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And of course, Sturgis in South Dakota is one of the most famous.
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And, of course, we have Daytona Beach. Now, while originally this was a race, it's now home to mostly miles of chrome covered cruisers glistening in the Florida sun. There's Laconia Motorcycle Week up in New Hampshire. And the BMW MOA has an annual rally for BMW riders that typically has more than 6000 bikes camping out at a big campground. Now, in Europe, we have the Elefantentreffen or elephant rally. And this was started in 1956 to honor Zundapp motorcycles, which were nicknamed the Green Elephant in Bavaria. Thunder Sprints is annually held in Northwich, Cheshire in England. And of course, there are many other events that can be found around the globe. And beyond some of these rallies, you can also start to think of some of the clubs. Now, if you mention a motorcycle club to a non rider, their mind me immediately go to one of the quote unquote biker gangs. You know, these might be things like Hells Angels or some of the other sort of. Extra legal, if you will, groups that people have a conception about.
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But there's many clubs that don't just fit that mold. You could have brand specific clubs like the Hog or the Harley Owners Group. The BMW Motorcycle Owners Association of America would be another example of this and more broadly, a non brand specific organization. It would be the American Motorcyclist Association. and these clubs really do set out to support the interests of motorcyclists and ensure that Their needs are being met. So as an example in the United States, oftentimes a lot of off road riding areas are being closed down and the AMA is doing a lot to try to minimize that and still make it available for people to continue to ride.
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They're also advocating for having things like, you know, lane splitting that you could do, and that's growing in popularity in more states. We actually did discuss that in a previous episode.
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let's wrap up. We've covered the earliest incarnations of motorcycles from the steam powered veleocipedes in 1867 to some of the iconic motorcycle brands like Harley and Indian. We discussed how bikes have continued to evolve with changing controls, the addition of suspension and continued improvement. And we also covered the cultural impact of motorcycles from music, movies, TV to fashion and even rallies. my question for you is, with so many cultural references to motorcycles. What got you interested in motorcycles? Was it a song, A movie? A friend, a family member? Share your thoughts with the text to show link in the show notes or leave us a voicemail at throttle and roast dot com slash voicemail.
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Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you next week.
