One hundred years ago at the dawn of the Roaring Twenties, before Harley started hogging things there were three main players in American motorcycling, out of the more than 200 different manufacturers of varying degrees of financial solvency and technical prowess which had attempted to carve out a place for themselves in the exciting and potentially profitable new arena of mechanised personal transportation. The so-called Big Three consisted of Indian, Harley-Davidson – and Excelsior. So, alongside GM and Ford, read Chrysler – or to BSA and Matchless, add Triumph.
The Excelsior Supply Company was formed in Chicago in 1876 by George T Robie, initially distributing sewing-machine parts before, in the early 1890s, it branched into the booming bicycle business. Chicago had become the centre of the American cycle industry, with 30 factories collectively churning out thousands of bikes each day, and indeed over a million bicycles a year were produced in the USA by the turn of the century, many of them sold through department stores’ mail order shopping.
But the sales boom was short-lived, as the market inevitably got saturated, so by 1905 US bicycle sales had fallen to just a quarter of their 1900 volume, not helped by a growing interest in powered two-wheelers.
It was Robie’s son Frederick who persuaded his father to begin manufacturing motorcycles, establishing the Excelsior Motor and Manufacturing Co in 1907 to do so. Its first model, named the Triumph Model B, used a 1¾hp, 344cc Thor F-head/IOE (inlet-over-exhaust, aka ‘pocket valve’) single-cylinder engine designed by Indian, but built under licence by the Aurora Automatic Machine Co, 40 miles west of Chicago, albeit installed in Excelsior’s own chassis.
In 1908, the first 100 self-built Excelsior Model A was introduced, designed by George Meiser, joined in 1910 by the first of the famous line of 61ci/1000cc X-twin Excelsiors. These were so-called because, though powered by a 45° V-twin like their Harley and (40°) Indian rivals, their offset cylinders denoted con rods which sat side-by-side on the crankpin, rather than the fork-and-blade system the other
