Harley-Davidson: Two Kids and a Borrowed Machine Shop

In nineteen oh one, a twenty-year-old draftsman named William Harley sketched a design for a small motorized bicycle engine in his notebook. It had a displacement of seven point oh seven cubic inches, which is a number that means nothing to most people except that it was small enough to mount on a bicycle frame. He brought the sketch to his childhood friend Arthur Davidson. They started working on it in the machine shop of their friend Henry Melk, on the north side of Milwaukee, in what later became famous as the woodshed of American motorcycle mythology, though it was actually a machine shop.

It took until nineteen oh three to produce a working machine. By that year, two more Davidsons, Walter and William, had joined the project. The company was named with Harley's name first, despite there being three Davidsons, because the original idea had been his.

The first Harley-Davidson was entered in a race in nineteen oh four and came in fourth. They built three motorcycles in nineteen oh three, then eight more in nineteen oh four, then fifty in nineteen oh six. They incorporated in nineteen oh seven. By nineteen fourteen, the company had become one of the largest motorcycle manufacturers in the world.

The motorcycle Harley-Davidson built became something more than transportation. It became a symbol of American road freedom in a way that no other machine has quite matched. The military used them in both world wars. Police departments across the country adopted them. The outlaw motorcycle culture that emerged after World War Two, which the company had nothing to do with, attached itself to the brand so completely that the brand incorporated the mythology in its own marketing.

The Harley-Davidson Museum on South Canal Street houses the original nineteen oh three prototype and tells the manufacturing story in full. The machines in the collection are worth an hour of anyone's time.