Thanks to all who replied to the " First Motorcycle ? " inquiry
.......
most interesting and informative answers . I had always believed the first
motorcycle had been constructed by Gottlieb Daimler, as Ed and Tom
replied ...... but that was the first INTERNAL COMBUSTION powered one .
Ed also came up with the Frenchman Louis Perot / mid 1800' s / with
STEAM POWER ..... I hadn' t heard of him, but he must be in the record
somewhere . My friend at the other end of Connecticut, Bob Swanson,
came up with the same name that I read about only a month or so ago
...... Sylvester H. Roper from Roxbury, Massachusetts, who built a
steam powered " velocipede ", as it was called back then, and this is
supposedly on display in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
Mr. Roper also had built steam powered carriages in the 1860' s,
some with two separate cast cylinders mounted horizontally under the
buggy seat, and by 1870 he had built at least ten of these .
The Grand Rapids, Michigan, " Eagle " newspaper of September 9,
1864, proclaimed his vehicle " The Marvel of The Age ", and stated that
it would " supercede the use of horses on the ordinary thoroughfare. "
One of these four wheeled steam carriages is said to be displayed
in the Henry Ford Museum. Roper' s carriages were not the first steam
carriages, however ...... Oliver Evans got a patent for a steam powered
vehicle as early as 1787, but may have never actually built one .... but
a Mr. Thomas Blanchard of Springfield, MA, is recorded as having
driven a steam carriage, of some sort, on the streets of that city in the
year 1825 ! This information, and quite a bit more on early steam
and electric vehicles, is from the 1960 Trend Book No.193,
" Antique and Classic Cars " by Joe H. Wherry .
Thanks for the responses .... they are all a part of our motorized history
.....
as is ( according to Joe Amo ) the REAL pioneer : Ed Van Scoy !!!
Bruce
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