Motorcycling’s changing responses to vibration
In the earliest days the big issue was reliability. Will this thing start and run? Engines at first turned slowly, and because vibration is proportional to rpm, squared, it was unimportant as compared with the thumps of cylinder firings. For that reason, car engines soon progressed from one to two cylinders, then jumped to four, and as quickly as engineers such as Henry Royce could tame the torsional vibrations of longer crankshafts, to six cylinders.
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