While the motorcycle is generally regarded as a product of the Twentieth Century, its origins actually go back all the way to the late 1700s, when the steam engine was being developed as a source of power. As early as 1785, William Murdock-a pupil of James Watt, inventor of the steam engine-built what was called a steam tricycle. In 1868, an early pioneering effort called the Austin velocipede marked the mating of a steam engine to a two-wheeled vehicle. This was also attempted later in 1884 by two Californians, L.D. and W.E. Copeland. Like Murdock's tricycle, these proved unsuccessful. Over the decades, many other inventors experimented with steam-powered vehicles with little success.

By the late 1800s, when the gasoline engine was going through the same formative period as the steam engine did a century earlier, a Frenchman by the name of Delamare-Deboutteville produced what is generally regarded as the first motor-driven tricycle, utilizing a carburetor which he patented in 1884. While it marked the first successful mating of a gasoline engine to a tricycle chassis, the contraption apparently was never produced on any scale and slipped into obscurity.

Carl Benz of Mannheim, Germany, later of Mercedes-Benz fame, developed a gasoline tricycle about the same time and actually patented it in 1885. His invention was not a commercial success, either.

Gottlieb Daimler, a German contemporary of Deboutteville and Benz, was also developing a gasoline-powered machine at this time, but his was twowheeled. Propelled by a half-horsepower motor, Daimler's wooden-wheeled invention was successfully ridden for the first time on November 10, 1885 and marked the inauspicious beginning of the true motor bicycle or motorcycle, as it was later called.

Whether unable to see the practical application of his remarkable invention, despite earning a U. S. patent for it in 1885, or perhaps occupied with other interests, Gottlieb Daimler produced that one and only machine. He died in 1899, unaware of the future of the sport he had pioneered.