The archive at Mortons is a vast repository of incredible motorcycling history – from the dawn of motorised transport, when it was all new and no idea was deemed unworthy of exploration, to the more modern times when it seemed everything had been tried.
A trip through the boxes and files in the archive reveals all manner of weird and wonderful things from those days when the inventive world had shown there were other ways of producing transport which didn’t rely on either human or animal power or shovelling coal into a furnace to heat water.
Carl Benz’s early experiments with the hitherto discarded by-products of oil production culminated in a single cylinder two-stroke engine bursting into life in 1879.
From these modest beginnings he developed and patented what would be the world’s first petrol engine vehicle in 1885 and set the world on the road to owning personal automotive transport. It wasn’t long before such engines were adapted for use in bicycles and the birth of the motorcycle happened.
Since those far-off days just about everything else had been tried as a power source for motorcycles – from sail to steam and even jet propulsion –
