Not Harley-Davidson, Not Indian: This Is America's Oldest Motorcycle Brand

The seemingly age-old question of the first and oldest American motorcycle brand gets batted around more than a tennis ball at Wimbledon. It usually comes down to a shoot-out between two venerable American legends: Harley-Davidson and Indian Motorcycle (which Polaris just sold to Carolwood LP). Unless you're intimately familiar with the history of how all motorcycles first evolved from pedal-powered bicycles, chances are you'd guess Harley wins the battle due to the very nature of its popularity and status within American pop culture. 

You'd be wrong, because Milwaukee's powerhouse rolled out in 1903, a full two years after George M. Hendee and Oscar Hedstrom kick-started their Indian motorcycle in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1901. But all of that is moot since neither of them was actually first. That honor belongs to a company and a person you've likely never heard of. In Waltham, Massachusetts. Charles H. Metz established the Waltham Manufacturing Company in 1893, which he spun off from a watch-making business. Much like Harley and Indian, Metz began building bicycles for a public obsessed with them.

Metz's creation was known as the Orient-Aster, or simply, the Orient. The name was cobbled together based on a previous job he had at the Orient Fire Insurance Co., plus the builder of the engine he was using. In 1898, he fastened an imitation version of the successful De Dion-Bouton internal combustion engine (built by Aster) to one of his Orient bicycles. The DeDion-Bouton engines were originally built in France and helped guide the hand of other motorcycle builders of the day, including Indian.

Interestingly, the whole idea behind attaching a motor to a bicycle frame came about not as a product to sell to the public, but as a means to an end: getting the riders on his bicycle racing team to go faster. After all, Metz had been the highwheel bike (aka the "Ordinary" or Penny-Farthing) champion of New York State in 1885 — the same year Gottlieb Daimler built his wooden contraption called the Rietwagen over in Germany. As his team won more races, sales of his hand-built Orient bicycles, considered one of the "most popular and state-of-the-art" at the time, also began to rise. Believe it or not, bicycle racing was this country's favorite sport at the time.

Over the next few years, Metz became obsessed with building more pacing machines and started cranking out versions with three and four wheels. Metz advertised his two-wheeled "pace machine" as the "Orient Motor-cycle" in the pages of his 1899 catalog, and in doing so, it became the first published use of the term we now know as "motorcycle." Before its appearance, the most commonly used word for these contraptions was "motor-bicycles," of which there had been plenty made all around the world.

The Orient's first public appearance came when he entered it in a race at the Charles River Speedway on July 31, 1900. Not only did it win, but it also helped establish the first official motorcycle speed race held in the United States, and it's considered by many to be the first production motorcycle in America.