Positively luxurious by the standards of the era, the 1909 Pierce was the first fourcylinder motorcycle to be manufactured in the USA for customer sale. At a time when most other motorcycles available for purchase were essentially spindly-framed bicycles fitted with often diminutive single and twin-cylinder engines, the Pierce was substantial by comparison, yet decidedly avantgarde. With its massive tubular steel frame which at once set it apart from its rivals, it also stood out for the comparative smoothness of its four-cylinder engine that led to it being dubbed the ’Vibrationless Motorcycle’.
As a Pierce advert declared,’Pierce motorcycles are not made to compete in price, but to surpass in quality. It is a deluxe motorcycle for discriminating riders.’The fact that it traced its roots to the PierceArrow Motor Car Co., maker of the most prestigious American cars then available, two of which were ordered in 1909 by US President William Howard Taft as the first official White House cars for use on state occasions, added further lustre to its appeal.
The son of English migrants to the USA, George Norman Pierce was born in 1846 in Friendsville, Pa., but had moved to Buffalo, NY by the time he started a company there in 1865 known as Heinz, Pierce and Munschauer, makers of home furnishings such as bathtubs, birdcages and ice boxes. In 1872 Pierce bought out his two partners, and changed the firm’s name to the George N. Pierce Company, which in 1892 began making bicycles bearing what would become its famous Arrow badge. These were so successful that in 1895 it switched over to making them full time, many using a shaft drive to the rear wheel, rather than chain.
Pierce thensingle-cylinder engine imported from France. In 1903, it introduced a twincylinder car, the Arrow, now using the firm’s own motor, but business really took off with the 1904 debut of the larger, more luxurious Great Arrow, which became Pierce’s most successful model. Driven by Percy Pierce, the son of the company’s owner, the solidly-built four-cylinder car won the debut Glidden Tour in 1905, a prestigious 1100-mile endurance race from New York City to Bretton Woods, NH.
