Ahead of the game
Glenn Hammond Curtiss (1878-1930) was an American aviation and motorcycle pioneer, who later went on to essentially found the US aircraft industry. He was originally a Western Union cycle messenger who built and raced his own bicycles, before opening a shop in his home town of Hammondsport, New York, southeast of Buffalo, where he manufactured a line of cycles he designed and developed himself. But with the availability of internal combustion engines, Curtiss became interested in motorcycles, so he began manufacturing his own design of 500cc single-cylinder motors in the back room of his bicycle shop, fuelled by a carburettor adapted from a tomato soup can containing a gauze screen to pull the fuel up by capillary action.
These engines were used to power the Hercules motorcycles which Curtiss first advertised in 1902 as costing $200, followed a year later by a 1000cc V-twin, created by combining two of his single-cylinder motors on a common crankcase. This was the first example to be constructed of what would become the iconic American V-twin motorcycle, with Indian following suit in 1905, and Harley-Davidson only in 1907. According to his local newspaper, the Hammondsport Herald, in 1903: “With
