The first of the many
SOME consider it the world’s first motorcycle. Yet, despite its revolutionary mark on the world, Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach’s ‘Reitwagen’ –‘riding car’ – was merely a stepping stone with which to experiment a much bolder concept: the transportation of human beings via an engine. Built in wood, the machine was never commercially produced but it was test ridden and it was the world’s first vehicle to be propelled by an internal combustion engine.
And thanks to the modest, odd-looking wooden motorcycle, the wheels of modern transportation had been squarely set in motion. The Reitwagen was not merely a vessel for advancing Daimler’s engine design; it was a vessel for modernity. It was also an expression of Daimler’s lifelong and near-instinctive belief in the power of the internal combustion engine.
Mercedes-Benz Classic archivist Daniela Sigl explained: “It was one of Gottlieb Daimler’s earliest goals to produce a motorised two-wheeler. In fact, his son, Paul, is recorded as saying: “I remember very clearly that my father, even at the time when he lived in Deutz (Cologne) and managed Nicolaus Otto’s machine factory there, expressed the thought over and over again that it must be something indescribably marvellous to own a vehicle that, powered by a motor, developed a corresponding speed and allowed at least one person to use
