The Michaux-Perreaux steam velocipede was a steam-powered moving machine. It looked like a motorcycle. It was a steam engine on a bicycle. Louis-Guillaume Perreaux made the steam engine, and Pierre Michaux made the bicycle. It was made in France between 1867 and 1871. It is one of three moving machines that people say could be the first motorcycle. The two others are the Roper steam velocipede of 1867 or 1868 and the internal combustion engine Daimler Reitwagen of 1885. Perreaux made the steam velocipede better over time. He had built a tricycle version by 1884. The only Michaux-Perreaux steam velocipede made, on loan from the Musée de l'Île-de-France, Sceaux, was the first machine viewers saw when they went into the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum rotunda in the Art of the Motorcycle exhibition in New York in 1998.
First motorcycle? Not everyone agrees on which machine was the first motorcycle. Wtiter L. J. K. Setright said the simplest way to say what a motorcycle was was a bicycle with a heat engine. "If we accept this we must go on to admit that its prototype is unidentifiable, shrouded in the mists of industrial antiquity," meaning that this definition meant no one could say for sure which motorcycle was first. Both the Michaux-Perreaux and Roper machines have also been said to be produced in the years 1867, 1868, and 1869.
Other people, such as Cycle World'''s Technical Editor Kevin Cameron, say neither of these two machines were the first motorcycles. They either say that a true motorcycle must use a gasoline internal combustion engine, or that the first motorcycle must use the same technology as motorcycles that were good enough for people to make many of them. They say that "dead end" motorcycles do not count. These people say that Wilhelm Maybach and Gottlieb Daimler's 1885 Daimler Reitwagen was the first motorcycle.
The first motorcycle that was mass-produced is easier to find. It was the liquid cooled four-stroke Hildebrand & Wolfmüller of 1894. It was mass-produced, and sold commecially.
Definition of first motorcycle
The Oxford English Dictionary'' and other dictionaries say that motorcycles must have an internal combustion engine. By this definition, the Michaux-Perreaux steam velocipede is not a motorcycle. For most of the 20th century, people thought this definition of "motorcycle" was good. But then electric motorcycles became more important.
Some people say the Reitwagen was the first motorcycle because its power generator is like the power generators in almost all later motorcycles that worked well. Cameron said, "History follows things that succeed, not things that fail." Writer Glynn Ker ignored the Michaux-Perraux altogether. Ker says the Daimler Reitwagen is, "the predecessor of all gasoline-driven vehicles on land, sea, or air." He does not call it a true motorcycle, though, because it had to use two wheels that stuck out from the sides to keep from falling over, so it could not lean to the side the way modern motorcycles do. Kerr also says that that the Reitwagen was not as well designed as other vehicles Daimler and Maybach made. Daimler and Maybach were not interested in motorcycles at the time. They wanted to use the Motorwagen to test their engine. After they had developed it, they worked on building a four wheeled stagecoach, a hot air balloon, and a boat instead. David Burgess-Wise called the Daimler-Maybach test bed "a crude makeshift." He said, "as a bicycle, it was 20 years out of date."
Development
L. J. K. Setright and David Burgess-Wise say that it was Pierre Michaux's son Ernest who first attached the engine to the velocipede. Charles M. Falco says it was Louis-Guillaume Perreaux. The Michaux-Perreaux machine was made out of one of the first pedal bicycles that sold well, a boneshaker. Michaux had been building over 400 of these bicycles per year since 1863. The velocipede also used a single cylinder alcohol fueled Perreaux engine, which used twin flexible leather belt drives to the rear wheel. They put a steam pressure gauge where the rider could see it, above the front wheel. They added a hand control so the rider could control the steam. The base Michaux velocipede came with a spoon brake, but the steam version had no brakes. The engine weighed , and the whole steam velocipede weighed . In a June 14, 1871 version, Perreaux removed some cranks and pedals from the front wheel. There was an arched downtube instead of straight one to give the engine more space. The steam velocipede worked. It did not have any commercial successors.