Celebrating the Beginnings of our Mobility

Mobility is what wheels and engines are all about. Horses and other animals helped people to move further and faster, and the addition of wheeled vehicles extended the usefulness of the animals. Then the bicycle, in the 1800s, proved to be a permanent extension to our mobility. Who doesn't remember the freedom they felt when they first rode on two wheels? But that internal combustion engine... now that changed things!

The first cars, of course, were like many new things today: The early adopters had to have money. But suppose you could rig one of those new internal combustion engines up to a bicycle... wouldn't that be something? People of modest means might enjoy quite an extended range! And so it was that bicycle manufacturers like Triumph and Royal Enfield in England, and Indian in the United States, began building motorized bicycles... motor bikes or motor cycles... around 1901 and 1902.

I recall an episode of NCIS where the assassin "Ari" met Gibbs in some remote location, riding up on a motorcycle (a Ducati as I recall). Gibbs said "nice bike", to which Ari replied "it isn't a 'bike', it's a 'motorcycle'". In his arrogance, he ignored the history of the machine.

Until Henry Ford reduced the price of his cars and doubled his workers' incomes, regular folk saw these motor cycles as a great liberator. It was now possible to get a good paying job in the city while living on the farm. It was now possible for a single fellow to take a very long trip. And it was fun! Indeed, after the great wars in Europe, and even today, motorcycles and scooters allow mobility for a lot of people who would otherwise be dependent.

In celebration of that time, the time before automobiles were affordable, there's an event going on right now called the Motorcycle Cannonball.  It is essentially a rally, the goal being to cover as many miles of the route as possible under your own power. If you break down one day, you can fix it and pick up at the next day's starting place. There are three classes: Single cylinder, single speed; two-cylinder, single-speed; and two-cylinder, multiple-geared motorcycles, the most "modern" of the bunch. As of today (Tuesday, September 21) 11 of 45 entrants have traveled 2114 of the 3300 mile rally completely on their own, and these motorcycles were all originally manufactured in 1915 or earlier. Even more amazing is that only a few are completely out of the event. Yes, it's been a lot of work, and many are spending their evenings making repairs, but it reminds us of the time when an average person could build or rebuild an engine and get their machine on the road. I wish I lived close enough to see them!

It seems somehow fitting that this week, the winners of the Progressive Automotive X-Prize were announced, in which participants had to build a car and a business plan to produce it, and the car had to get the equivalent of over 100 mpg. "Equivalent" because they could be powered by electricity or a hybrid system. And it's fitting to this historical event, because the winner, made by a company called Edison2, was the Very Light Car powered not by a complicated and heavy system requiring batteries, but by a two-cylinder motorcycle engine. Internal combustion has some years left as the most efficient and cleanest option, it seems.

It is a celebration, and celebrate we should! I'm 100% on board with making engines run cleaner and for finding ways to use less energy, but would any of us want to go back to the days before we were mobile? I'm thinking that it's time to do my own celebration by taking a road trip with my wife; no airplanes this time.