Daimler Reitwagen

The Daimler Reitwagen, German for riding car and also called the Einspur or single track, was a motor vehicle made by Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach in 1885 and is widely recognised as the first motorcycle. Daimler and Maybach built it as a test bed to prove their compact, high speed single cylinder petroleum engine in a vehicle, not to start a motorcycle industry. It carried a 264 cubic centimetre single cylinder Otto cycle four stroke engine mounted on rubber blocks, with two iron tread wooden wheels and a pair of spring loaded outrigger wheels that kept it upright, and the engine output of 0.37 kW gave it a speed of about 11 km/h. Daimler's 17 year old son Paul rode it first on 18 November 1885 from Cannstatt to Untertürkheim. Whether it counts as the first motorcycle depends on whether a motorcycle must have an internal combustion engine and on how the outrigger wheels are judged. The original was destroyed in the Cannstatt fire of 1903 and replicas are kept in several museums.