HISTORY CHANNEL

When I'm around old motorcycles, I often find myself wondering what it must've been like to be born in an earlier time. Wondering, mind you, not wishing. I wonder what it was like when mankind invented the motorcycle. I wouldn't want to get anywhere near the first motorcycle, the Daimler Reitwagen (the word means 'riding car', stupidly enough), made by German inventors Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach in 1885. To quote Melissa Holbrook Pierson, 'The first motorcycle looks like an instrument of torture.' And something that might cause an explosion uncomfortably close to one's nether regions. Right after it's shaken loose every healed bone in one's body.

- By KARTIK WARE @kartikware

But the Reitwagen was only a testbed for the Otto-cycle motor, a stop on the way to making the first car. Thankfully, the motorcycle's story continued. Living in today's world, every last nut and bolt of which is supervised by the bean counters, we can only imagine what it must've been like back then. People were trying all sorts of things with motorcycles, unfettered by convention (there wasn't any) and the burden of history (they were making it). Nothing was proven, so every idea was fair game.