Charles Falco
The headline on this feature is actually the sub-heading on an exciting new book, The Motorcycle.
PHAIDON doesn’t normally publish books about motorcycles. Claude Monet, Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso are more at home as subjects fort heart house publisher than combustionpowered bicycles. But now, after several years in the making, the publisher has released The Motorcycle: Design, Art and Desire, which charts the design evolution of the motorcycle from the early steampowered machines to the futuristic concepts of today.
The book – which hit the shelves at the end of November – also serves as a catalogue to an exhibition which was scheduled to run at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Australia. Of course, Covid knocked that on the head and so the exhibition is soon to go virtual as well as in person.
The Motorcycle looks and feels like a gallery: formatting is clean and minimal, images of machines are uncluttered and given centre stage, and so we see them as works of art in their own right. It presents an array of machines including the Belgian-built Socovel, 1942, an I mm eR 100, a Triumph Speed Twin, a Vincent Black Lightning 1951 and the steam-powered Perreaux Velocipede, 1871.
The book’s authors, Ultan Guilfoyle and Charles
Falco, have weaved technical and social history in and out of the motorcycle’s design narrative. Ultan and Charles are already familiar names in motorcycling:
found that for two years before Triumph introduced the Bonneville model they had applied a decal to the Thunderbird in recognition of Johnny Allen having set a land speed record in 1956. Being able to identify the specific marque, model and even the year of a motorcycle I had been on for a few hours decades earlier shows what an impression that ride, on the ‘world’s fastest motorcycle’, made on me.”
Since then, Charles has cemented his interest in motorcycles in parallel to his
career as professor of optical sciences at the University of Arizona. “My current interest in motorcycles isn’t a result of having come full circle from a misspent youth, but rather has been a parallel track throughout my career.
“I got my first motorcycle when I was 15, have never been without at least one ever since, and have ridden borrowed or rented motorcycles thousands of miles in a half-dozen countries on three continents, typically while in those countries to give lectures or attend physics conferences.”
Charles’ academic pursuit of facts likewise runs
throughout The Motorcycle. He charts – in detail – the developments of the motorcycle from the early steampowered machines to the innovative Britten V1000.
“The history of powered transportation can be divided into three eras based on the principal mode of propulsion in use at the time: steam, internal combustion and electric,” writes Charles in The Motorcycle. “After centuries of development, the steam engine had been reduced in size to such an extent that in 1770 NicolasJoseph Cugnot demonstrated a large steam-powered car for the French military. By the 1830s, steam carriages and tractors were in use in England, with developments in their speed, carrying capacity and reliability continuing throughout the rest of the nineteenth century.”
But steam-powered vehicles were short-lived, as charted in The Motorcycle, as it soon made way for the development of the combustion engine. “In 1862, even before the first steam motorcycle was made, Frenchman Alphonse Beau de Rochas had published the principle of the four-stroke internal combustion engine,” writes Charles. “The first working internal combustion engine was made in 1876 by Nikolaus Otto in Cologne, Germany. In 1885, Otto’s former assistant Gottlieb Daimler built a smaller engine near Stuttgart that he installed in a wooden bicycle-like frame with two outrigger wheels to create what he called a Reitwagen mit Petroleum Motor (riding car with petroleum engine). Although Daimler’s can be called the first internal combustion-powered motorcycle, he turned his attention to producing motor cars, and only in 1894 did the first commercial production of motorcycles begin.”
And from that point, Charles argues, all motorcycle design is united by the aim to continually propel people on two wheels. “Right from the start, designers have been trying to provide personal transportation initially for one person but very quickly for more than one person. And then they tried to figure out where to stick the passenger and this problem brought about many interesting designs.”
“But if you think about it,” says Charles, “a motorcycle is made using the same tools and materials as an automobile. So the price to produce a motorcycle is a lot cheaper than the price to produce a car. It basically comes down to dollars per pound and so the cost of producing motorcycles is way much less than a car and as such designers could afford to put more technology into motorcycles.”
Charles and his co-author, Ultan, found this apparent in all the motorcycles selected for The Motorcycle book and exhibition. “In all the examples selected the designers were trying to provide the latest, greatest, highest technology ahead of automobiles every step of the way. And that follows all the way through.”
Alongside the basic drive to propel passengers there existed myriad other factors influencing design, from basic geography to legislation. Charles illustrates this with the example of the proliferation of very early French and German motorcycles in the late 19th-century.
“The red flag laws really stopped innovation in Britain. If you had to hire somebody to walk in front as you rode your motorcycle it would seriously prohibit you buying one. The result of that being there was nobody trained to produce motorcycles. So that really held England back.
“And that’s how we’ve come to have 14mm spark plugs,” he says. “If England had been innovative in the very early days of the motorcycle and it hadn't had the red flag laws we’d have ⁄in spark plugs. You wouldn't have 88mm bores, which is a nightmare for Americans [working on an imperial system].”
“But there were incidental consequences of the Red Flag flaw, which would become very serious issues later on, for example the only company that made decent Magnetos before the First World War was Bosch, a German company. Every lorry, every aeroplane relied on Bosch but this presented problems during the war. It was a terrible crisis because you just couldn't get magnetos and we couldn't do anything without a reliable Magneto – and you want a reliable one when you’re at 10,000 feet!”
The war, of course, was another driving factor in design evolution. “If you look at the 1949 Imme it had a singlesided front swing arm. Now, where did someone get the idea for that? Well, if you look at the landing gear on a Messerschmitt German fighter, there’s the answer: its designer realised if they made one arm heavier it would use less metal overall.”
The Imme was built in the aftermath of the Second
World War, when Germany had little capacity for manufacturing. “Being able to minimise materials was very important. So the fact the Imme’s exhaust is made with heavier metal means it also serves as a single-sided swing arm. Parts are being duplicated,” says Charles. “Willie Messerschmitt always said if you can find one part that serves the function of two, then that’s what you should do.”
Likewise it was the war and its lack of raw materials that led to the development of the first electric motorcycle. “The 1942 Socovel was powered by three huge lead acid batteries and it didn't have much of a range. It had to be charged over a long period of time but there was no gasoline available. And so it provided something that filled a gap that just needed to be filled. It took many more years of technology development before reaching the point where the batteries can contain enough power to go a reasonable distance on a motorcycle. The electric motorcycles of today aren’t just coming out of nowhere.”
Indeed, this is the very essence of evolution itself, whether that of a human or machine: to improve upon what has been before. And The Motorcycle traces the evolution of motorcycle design with this concept in mind. “That’s an underlying theme of this exhibition: that everything is building on something before. So if you want to understand where motorcycles are going to go in the future, you really need to understand what went on in the past.”
Charles Falco continues with his ‘tour’ of The Motorcycle in the next issue of TCM…