Werner Motocylette
To start this CB tribute to the 500s that defined each decade from the start of the 20th century, we return to the earliest days of motorcycling, when inventive types made up their own rules...
While the motor car simply developed from the pony and trap, replacing one form of horsepower with another, there was no twowheeler readily adaptable to engine power until the introduction of the Safety Bicycle in the mid-1880s. With no established pattern to follow, brothers Michel and Eugene Werner chose to power their 1897 machine by front wheel drive, with the engine on the front fork.
Werner Frères of Paris were dealers in new technology – typewriters, gramophones and cinema equipment. Visiting Amsterdam on business, Michel Werner was intrigued by a bicycle converted to self-propulsion by driving the front wheel with a fork-mounted electric cine-projector motor. Returning home with this in mind, he mounted a compact 91cc petrol engine (supplied by designer Hippolyte Labitte to try in a projector) on a bicycle and in January 1897, Werner Frères patented their front-wheel drive contraption, calling it the ‘Motocyclette’, thus adding a word to the French language that survives today.
The machine’s success led to replacing the Labitte engine with a larger, 216cc unit of Werners’ own by 1899. Typical of the period, the side exhaust valve was mechanically operated but the inlet was atmospheric – fitted with a light spring, it was literally sucked open by the descending piston, a system that worked best with low revs.
Primitive though it was, the FD (front drive) Werner ticked enough boxes to become the top seller of the day; Werner’s impressive production turnover aided consistency and gave the company stability at a time when most new ideas simply flashed in the pan. English motor industry entrepreneur HJ Lawson spent £4000 on the rights for his ‘Motor Manufacturing Company’ to manufacture the bikes in Britain (where an enthusiastically-enforced 12mph speed limit had stifled the development of domestic designs) and by 1900 Werner sales had broken four figures. Unsprung both front and rear, the 25mph Werner was a handful. Carburation relied on fumes from a tin containing fuel more volatile than today’s petrol being sucked through the atmospheric valve and ignited by a sort of glow-plug in the combustion chamber that was kept incandescent by an external burner arrangement. Unsurprisingly, the combination of a top-heavy machine, a swishing tin of volatile fuel and a Bunsen burner meant that in the likely event of dropping your early Werner, it could easily explode into flames!
Britain’s great test of man and machine in the first decade of the 20th century was the ‘End to End Run’, between Land’s End and John O’groats; at that time reckoned to be around 900 miles, on shocking roads. In September 1901 Hubert Egerton of Norwich was the first motorcyclist to do it, battling his FD Werner for four days and nine hours – an average of nine miles per hour that included a 10-hour breakdown repair. Impressive – although just 11 months later, another iron man, EH Arnott, shaved the time to 65 hours, 45 minutes, albeit riding a new, improved model. The ‘New-werner’ of 1901, as ridden into the record books by Arnott, had rear-wheel drive. Moving the pedals further back and cutting out the frame’s bottom bracket provided space to fit the crankcases in what became known as the ‘diamond’ or ‘keystone’ position, making the bike vastly more manageable – and before long the New-werner engine position was adopted by all.
Racing wins for French ace Auguste Bucquet in the gruelling Paris-vienna and Paris-madrid events of ’02 and ’03 further reinforced Werner’s reputation and led to a 350cc ‘Course’ (racing) model and, from 1904 on, the company’s ultimate motocyclette, a 500cc parallel twin. In truth 428cc, with
60 x 76mm separate cylinders, side by side on a common crankcase it was a machine that performed and sold well. With the old days of being a one-model manufacturer far behind them, Werner added a smaller 285cc twin, a 210cc ‘lightweight’ model weighing just 65lb, and even dabbled with a small car. But time was running out for the Werner brothers and their business. Ill-chosen investments created financial problems and when Michel Werner died in 1908, three years after his brother and aged just 46, the company sank into oblivion.
Yet, read any recollections of those riding before World War I and you’ll usually find their passion was seeded by an illicit first ride on ‘an ancient front-drive Werner’. Even though most of those maiden voyages seem to have ended in a hedge or ditch and injury, the experience and the Werner are remembered fondly. On these grounds, the Werner could lay claim to being the world’s first ever ‘classic bike’ – the machine everyone remembered and that typified the age.
If you think such nostalgia didn’t come till much later, as far back as 1910 a correspondent suggested in the Motor Cycle that a museum should be opened to commemorate early machines, specifically mentioning an FD Werner he had recently seen for sale. It wasn’t until the opening of the Montagu museum that early vehicles had a home – and even longer before motorcycles were featured. But even so, a surprising number of Werners still survive for those wanting to experience motorcycling at the deep end today.