Picture a wooden frame, iron wheels, a seat prone to catching fire, and a top speed barely faster than a brisk jog. It doesn’t exactly conjure the image of a sleek, throaty motorcycle thundering down an open highway — and yet, this peculiar contraption, built in a garden shed in Stuttgart, Germany in 1885, is widely recognised as the world’s oldest recorded motorcycle. Meet the Daimler Petroleum Reitwagen: the machine that — quite accidentally — started one of the greatest transportation revolutions in human history.
The Daimler Reitwagen was the creation of two German engineering visionaries: Gottlieb Daimler and his gifted colleague Wilhelm Maybach. Born in 1834 in Schorndorf, Germany, Daimler was a trained engineer who spent his career obsessing over one idea — building a small, high-speed internal combustion engine that could be fitted into virtually any form of transport. He earned the title “Father of the Motorcycle,” though, as history would reveal, he never actually intended to build one.
The two men had been working together since the early 1870s and shared an almost singular vision: to create a compact engine capable of running at speeds far higher than existing designs. In 1882, Daimler established a private experimental workshop in the garden shed behind his house in the Cannstatt district of Stuttgart. Away from the politics of large engine manufacturers, he and Maybach were free to innovate at will.
By 1885, the pair had perfected what they affectionately called the “grandfather clock engine” — so named because of its striking visual resemblance to a large pendulum clock. It was a single-cylinder, four-stroke internal combustion engine that ran on petroleum, and it was unlike anything that had come before it. Now they needed to prove it could power a vehicle. The only problem? The engine wasn’t yet powerful enough to move a full-sized carriage.
So they did what any resourceful engineers would do — they bolted it to the lightest frame they could build.
Here lies one of history’s great ironies. Daimler and Maybach did not set out to invent the motorcycle. The Reitwagen was, in their eyes, nothing more than a test bed — a way to prove their engine’s capabilities before fitting it to the four-wheeled automobile that was their true ambition. As motorcycle historian Melissa Holbrook Pierson memorably observed, the first motorcycle looks like “an instrument of torture,” created along the way to Daimler’s real goal, earning him the title of motorcycle inventor “malgré lui” — in spite of himself.
And yet, in building their engine testbed, they created something world-changing.
The Reitwagen — the word translates from German as “riding car” or “riding wagon,” also known as the Einspur (“single track”) — was a remarkable-looking machine, though not in the way we might expect from a revolutionary invention.
It was primitive by any modern standard, but it was a working, petroleum-powered, two-wheeled vehicle — and that made it unlike anything that had existed before.
The maiden voyage of the Reitwagen is one of the great — and slightly chaotic — moments in engineering history. On 18 November 1885, Daimler’s 17-year-old son, Paul Daimler, climbed aboard the machine for its first test ride. He set off from Cannstatt and rode approximately 5–12 kilometres to the town of Untertürkheim in Stuttgart.
It did not go entirely smoothly.
The hot-tube ignition system — that open flame sitting directly beneath the rider’s seat — did exactly what you might fear. The seat caught fire. Fortunately, Paul survived unscathed, and the Reitwagen itself completed the journey. It was, by any measure, an extraordinary accomplishment. The internal combustion engine had proven it could power a personal vehicle. The world would never be the same.
This is where history becomes delightfully complicated. Whether the Reitwagen truly deserves the title of “world’s oldest motorcycle” depends heavily on how you define the word motorcycle.
There were steam-powered two-wheelers that preceded the Reitwagen:
Both of these machines are legitimate contenders for the title of “world’s first motorcycle” — if you accept steam power as qualifying. However, the critical argument for the Reitwagen’s primacy rests on engine type. As Cycle World Technical Editor Kevin Cameron succinctly put it: “History follows things that succeed, not things that fail.” Steam-powered transportation was ultimately a dead end. The internal combustion engine was the future — and the Reitwagen was first.
The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “motorcycle” specifically references an internal combustion engine, further cementing the Reitwagen’s claim. By that standard, the 1885 Daimler Reitwagen stands alone as the world’s oldest recorded motorcycle.
To truly appreciate the Reitwagen, you need to understand what made its engine special. Before Daimler and Maybach’s work, internal combustion engines were large, slow, and impractical for personal transportation. The engines of the era could barely exceed 200 rpm and had no throttle control — making them useful only for stationary applications like pumps and factory machinery.
Daimler’s goal was an engine that could reach a minimum of 600 rpm with proper throttle control. By 1885, he and Maybach had achieved exactly that. The “grandfather clock” engine was:
This engine wasn’t just a curiosity. It was the blueprint for every internal combustion engine that followed — in motorcycles, cars, boats, and eventually aircraft. The Reitwagen was, as historians have noted, the forerunner of virtually every motorised vehicle on land, sea, and in the air.
By 1886, the Reitwagen had served its purpose. Daimler and Maybach upgraded its transmission over the winter of 1885–1886, but with the engine’s capabilities proven, their attention shifted entirely to their true goal: the four-wheeled automobile. The Reitwagen was set aside.
Tragically, the original Reitwagen was destroyed in the catastrophic Cannstatt Fire of 1903, which razed the Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft plant. The world’s first motorcycle no longer physically exists.
However, several highly detailed replicas have been constructed and can be viewed today at:
The Reitwagen lit a spark — quite literally on that November day in 1885. Within a decade, the motorcycle had evolved dramatically:
By the early 20th century, motorcycles had evolved from rickety wooden curiosities into powerful, reliable machines, with manufacturers like Harley-Davidson (founded 1903) and Indian Motorcycle defining an era. The Japanese manufacturers — Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki, and Kawasaki — entered the world market after the Second World War and went on to dominate global sales.
More than 140 years after Paul Daimler rode those first smoky kilometres through Stuttgart, the Reitwagen’s legacy is impossible to overstate. Every motorcycle on the road today — from a 200 mph superbike to a weekend cafe racer — traces its lineage directly back to that wooden, fire-prone machine in a German garden shed.
But the Reitwagen’s importance extends far beyond motorcycles. The “grandfather clock” engine that Daimler and Maybach perfected was the direct ancestor of the automobile engine, the marine engine, and ultimately the aircraft engine. Without the Reitwagen, there is no Benz Patent-Motorwagen (1886), no Wright Flyer (1903), no modern transport as we know it.
It is, in every meaningful sense, the machine that moved the world.
The 1885 Daimler Reitwagen is more than a museum curiosity or a footnote in engineering history. It is the founding moment of an industry that today encompasses hundreds of millions of riders worldwide. Born from practicality and necessity — not from any grand vision of building a motorcycle — it proved that small, efficient, gasoline-powered engines could transform personal transport forever.
The next time you throw a leg over a motorcycle and feel that engine fire to life beneath you, spare a thought for Paul Daimler, riding through the streets of Stuttgart with his seat on fire. He had no idea what he’d just started.
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