Daimler Patents the World's First Motorcycle
On this day · 29 August 1885
A wooden two-wheeler with training wheels and a half-horsepower engine became the unlikely ancestor of every motorcycle.
On 29 August 1885, German engineer Gottlieb Daimler filed German patent DRP 36423 for a single-track “vehicle with gas or petroleum engine.” Built with his partner Wilhelm Maybach in Cannstatt, the machine is widely recognised as the world’s first motorcycle.
Nicknamed the Reitwagen (“riding car”), it had a wooden frame, iron-shod wooden wheels, and a pair of spring-loaded outrigger wheels to keep it upright. Its compact single-cylinder four-stroke engine, sometimes called the “grandfather clock,” produced about 0.5 horsepower and pushed the contraption to roughly 11 km/h.
The Reitwagen was less a finished product than a rolling test bench for Daimler’s lightweight petrol engine.
Daimler cared more about that engine than the bike itself. The same powerplant soon went into boats and, in 1886, the motorised carriage that helped launch the automobile age. The original Reitwagen was destroyed by fire in 1903, but replicas survive in museums worldwide as a monument to where two-wheeled motoring began.
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