When my friend and RevZilla colleague Spurgeon told me it was time for me to appear in another Highside/Lowside podcast and the topic was “Motorcycles that changed history,” I immediately (and typically) tried to get out of it.
“I know a real motorcycle historian you should have on the show. He knows far more about motorcycle history than you or I do,” I argued.
That’s when Spurgeon semi-patiently explained that I should stop thinking like the journalist I used to be, trying to draw on the best sources to nail down the most accurate facts and defensible opinions, and start thinking like a podcast entertainer. “This is not a history book,” he replied. “This is just an entertaining discussion among three guys talking about bikes they think are significant, bikes we think people — maybe people new to motorcycling — should know about.”
I’ll leave it to the listeners and viewers to decide how entertaining it was, but it certainly wasn’t a definitive or boring historical look. While I chose two models that I thought were historically important and marked turning points in the motorcycle industry, Spurgeon and fellow co-host Zack made some subjective choices that I found surprising.
My picks
As you’ll see if you listen to or watch the podcast, I chose the 1938 Triumph Speed Twin and the 1959 Honda Super Cub as my choices. Both, in my opinion, changed the course of the motorcycle industry in ways that still reverberate today.
The Speed Twin, designed by legendary designer and Triumph General Manager Edward Turner, set the course for the British motorcycle industry for decades, and keep in mind that the British companies were on the top of the global motorcycle hierarchy for much of that time. Turner’s overhead-valve parallel twin was about as narrow and light as the single-cylinder engines that dominated the motorcycle market at that time. Not only are famous British motorcycles from the post-WWII era, from the Norton Commando to the Triumph Bonneville, direct descendants of that design, but so are the Japanese twins of the 1970s that played a big role in putting the British out of the motorcycle business. I would even argue that today’s resurgence of parallel-twin engines in the middleweight class of street bikes and adventure-touring motorcycles is just an echo of that influence. Turner showed that the parallel-twin engine architecture just makes a lot of sense, and it still does.
My other choice was an easy one: the best selling motor vehicle of all time and one that also happens to be the first motorcycle I ever rode. Six years ago, when global production of Cubs hit 100 million, I wrote about my own history with the humble little 50 cc scooter. When I was in grade school, my father went back to grad school for a year and needed the cheapest possible transportation to get across the city to classes. In 1967, that was a gas-sipping Honda 50 (as it was called in the U.S. market), which he bought for $245 and rode for one year. After that, he hardly ever rode a motorcycle again. But the Honda’s influence in my family continued. My mother started riding and became a motorcyclist off and on for the rest of her life. Years later, before I was old enough to have a license, I pulled the dusty old Honda out of the shed and rode it back and forth on our gravel driveway in West Virginia. So it was the first motorcycle I ever rode.
I think my choices are solid. I’m not so sure about some of Zack and Spurgeon’s selections, but I’ll let you decide what you think. It certainly isn’t a definitive history, but I hope it fulfills Spurgeon’s goal of being an entertaining conversation. And if at some point you smack your forehead and exclaim, “How could they pick that bike?!”, then that’s just part of the entertainment, I guess.
