After a few days of relative quiet here is an article about what is essentially one of the world's first motorcycles. An intriguing tale of the beginnings of the motorbike; it is interesting to note in the design the obvious debts owed to the bicycles of the period and yet in many other ways it is surprisingly modern. Certainly the speeds claimed are tremendous for the time, although I wouldn't fancy trying to hit 30mph on one of them, would you? Likewise we may laugh today at the thought of a 1.5-litre engine pumping out all of 2½ horsepower at a lowly 240 revs per minute, but then you have to remember that the predominant mode of transport at that time had one horsepower and travelled at an appreciably slower speed! Although from the sound of things the latter was still the more reliable.
What people, used to horse-drawn carriages and pushbikes, would have thought when seeing someone whizzing about on one of these I can't imagine. It must have been simply mind-boggling to have been alive during a period of such technological advancement.
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