Feature: The History of Harley-Davidson

Every biker knows that Willie G Davidson is the descendent of the one of Harley-Davidson’s founding fathers; what few know is that in its early days, the company was very much a family affair, with gentleman’s agreements, rich old uncle investors and sisters doing the painting.

At the age of just 21, William S. Harley completed the blueprint of an engine designed to fit into a bicycle. A year later, he’d built it and weeks later, the first Harley-Davidson was sold.

But despite being founded way back in 1903, Harley-Davidson was not the first American motorcycle company.

Bicycle racers George Hendee and Oscar Hedstrom started making the Indian Motorcycle in Springfield, in 1901. Despite coming from Homer Simpson’s home town, until its demise in 1953, Indian was a worthy rival to Harley-Davidson.

Bicycle maker and racer Glenn Curtiss began building motorcycles in 1901. In 1907 he reached 136mph (217km/h) on a motorcycle with a 40hp V8 engine and was hailed as “the fastest man alive” – thereby irrevocably proving the lie of “Speed Kills”.

Relying on the strengths of his superior engines, he gave up on motorcycles in 1913 and instead became a successful aviation pioneer, a rival of Wilbur and Orville Wright.

The Indian and Curtiss are just two among more than 50 American companies that once made motorcycles with any degree of success, yet only Harley has survived without interruption.

Generations of friends and family, even the extended family of dealers, customers and admirers have remained loyal to the marque through good times and bad.

Much of the inside story is described in Growing Up Harley-Davidson by Jean Davidson, the granddaughter of co-founder Walter Davidson and the daughter of company executive Gordon Davidson. She has known three generations of the motorcycle dynasty and managed a dealership.

The founders of H-D were actually only first-generation Americans. William Harley, the father of William S. Harley, immigrated from Littleport in England, in 1859 and was soon fighting in the Union Army. Bikers descend on the small English town in summer and are joined by Civil War re-enactors who wear the uniform of William Harley's regiment.

His son, William S., born in 1880, was a draftsman with a passion for engines, who started out making bicycles. While starting the motorcycle company in Milwaukee, he was also travelling 80 miles to study engineering at the University of Wisconsin.

Arthur Davidson was the youngest son of William C. Davidson, a Scottish carpenter. A childhood friend was Norwegian-born Ole Evinrude, who was also studying engines. Evinrude and Arthur worked as pattern-makers in a railway workshop, and made a pledge never to compete against each other. Ole Evinrude helped his friends with the carburettor and lubrication for their first motorcycle engines, and went on to achieve fame by building the first successful marine outboard motors and powered lawnmowers.

The Davidson family basement was the original workshop until their father built them a 3m x 5m shed in the back yard. Arthur's sister Janet was a talented artist who designed monograms for fine linens for her uncle's store; she playfully painted "Harley-Davidson Motor Co." on the shed door. She designed a logo that she painted in red on the gray fuel tanks, and she pinstriped the first motorcycles by hand.

Arthur soon recruited his brother Walter, from his job as a railway machinist in Kansas. Another brother, William Davidson, who was a railway tool foreman, joined the company in 1907.

An 80-year-old hermit uncle, James MacLay, who raised  bees, donated his life's savings to support the company. Elizabeth Davidson, three years Arthur’s junior, did the accounting. In return, the company eventually paid for her to go to university.
 
In the early 1900s, electric motors weren’t yet available for small machine tools, so a lathe with a chugging petrol engine was used to machine some parts, and others were surreptitiously machined in the railway workshops.

William Harley and Arthur Davidson made single-cylinder motorcycles as an alternative to horses for those who couldn’t afford a car. After their first motorcycle was sold to their school-yard friend Henry Meyer -- for $200 -- it would have a string of owners between 1903 and 1913.

Modern-day sleuthing suggests this very first Harley-Davidson covered 100,000 miles (160,000km) in an era when there were virtually no paved roads – despite being intended to be a racer.

In 1904, the first Harley-Davidson dealer, C.H. Lang of Chicago sold one of the first three production Harleys ever made. By 1906 the nickname “The Silent Grey Fellow” was coined.

Established in 1917, Brisbane’s Morgan & Wacker is the world's oldest Harley dealership outside the USA, and is Australia's oldest motorcycle dealer for any brand of bike. They’ve also been a BMW motorcycle dealer for over 55 years.

The Harley’s ruggedness and efficiency was demonstrated in 1908 when Walter Davidson entered a two-day endurance competition through the Catskill Mountains and ending in Brooklyn. He achieved a perfect score -- and 188 miles per gallon (86km per litre), a world record for fuel efficiency.

The first 45-degree V-twin engine was introduced in 1909 and remains the cornerstone of the marque. By 1914, the company was producing 1,600 motorcycles a year.

In 1916, General "Blackjack" Pershing ordered a dozen Harley-Davidsons, with machine guns mounted on sidecars, to drive the raiding parties of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa out of Texas. The next year, the United States entered World War 1 and their cavalry regiments shifted from horses onto 20,000 Harleys.

Another first-generation American, son of a Swedish-born US Congressman, Charles Lindbergh, dropped out of engineering school to explore America on a Harley, before learning to fly and becoming the first person to fly non-stop from New York to Paris.

Following the intense activity of  WWI, the company built just 11,000 bikes in 1921, after exceeding 20,000 a year from 1918 to 1920. Sales climbed back to 24,000 machines by 1929, but the stock market crash and Great Depression saw production drop to 3,600 in 1933.

Despite the depression, by 1936, six of the sons of the founders were working for the company. In 1936, the new 61 cubic inch EL model, designed by the company’s founders, became the original "Hog."

The second-generation William H. Davidson was the company’s president and Gordon Davidson became vice president in 1942, as World War II provided new military demand - peaking with 30,000 orders in 1943.

Soon after World War II, Harley found itself competing with lower-priced European and then more advanced Japanese motorcycles. In an unkind quirk, much of this competition had been partly subsidised by the Marshall Plan, intended to help war-ravaged countries rebuild their economies. The famous Indian motorcycle company couldn’t survive this period and ceased production in 1953 so Harley  became the last American motorcycle manufacturer.

But the iconic all-American Freedom machine was damaged by events beyond its control; disturbances during a Fourth of July celebration in Hollister, California in 1947 were widely reported - and exaggerated. The cover of Life magazine showed a rider with a beer in each hand posing on a Harley, in a street of broken bottles.

Some restless returned WWII servicemen, unable to find work, and looking for who-knows-what, found acceptance in groups of other, similar disaffected people. It was the beginning of the rise of the notorious biker gangs.

The events of Hollister inspired the 1953 movie, The Wild One with Marlon Brando playing an outlaw biker, while the 1969 classic, Easy Rider had an American lawyer (Jack Nicholson) joining pot-smoking Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, who were riding their  Harley choppers across the country, in search of “the Real America”.

Honda entered the American market in the 1960s, and their adverts cheekily suggested, "You meet the nicest people on a Honda."

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter rode a foreign bike while campaigning in Georgia; his brother, Billy claimed he was the only normal member of the family: their elderly mother had joined the Peace Corps, his brother was trying to be president, one sister was an evangelist - and the other sister rode a Harley-Davidson.

By 1965, the third-generation Harley and Davidson family heirs wanted out, so the company was bought by AMF - American Machine and Foundry. Sales rose steadily from 13,000 motorcycles in 1965 to 47,000 in 1980, but new-model development lagged as a new generation of bike buyers embraced the quicker, faster and cheaper bikes from Japan.

In 1981, designer Willie G. Davidson, grandson of William A. Davidson, was among the investors who bought the company back. It soon looked like a bad deal as sales plunged to 28,000 units in 1982. High-quality, low-cost imports were again threatening the company's survival.

In April 1983, with Harley-Davidson rapidly skidding toward bankruptcy, President Ronald Reagan became the company's improbable saviour. Unlike Jimmy Carter, President Reagan had never ridden a motorcycle, his preference being a horse.

Reagan imposed  a temporary tariff on imported Japanese motorcycles with engines larger than 700cc. The tariff  increased the cost of Japanese imports by 40 per cent, decreasing to 10 per cent over five years. The Japanese responded by sleeving down their 750s into unique-to-America 700cc models.

In 1987, Harley-Davidson announced that it was profitable again and that protection was no longer needed. President Reagan made a highly publicised visit to the factory and posed on a Harley.

Total production in ’87  was 36,000 motorcycles. Production in 2007 peaked at 330,619 but dropped to 303,479 in 2008, with a target for this year of just 273,000.

The 45-degree V-twin - with its unique uneven rhythm - has been the company's signature engine since 1909 but has had improvements in valve layout and materials. Since the Knucklehead was introduced in 1935, each engine has been given a name that roughly describes the cylinder-head’s appearance. These include the Panhead in 1948, the Flathead in 1952, the Ironhead for the 1957 Sportster, the Shovelhead in 1966, the Blockhead for the aluminium Evolution engine in 1984, and the Fathead for the twin-cam 1,450 cc engine in 1999.

In 1994, the company tried to patent the engine’s unique sound as a trademark, but eventually withdrew the application in 2000.

The sound is an integral part of Harley-Davidson's V-twin engines with carburettors, but it’s been a challenge for engineers to preserve it in new, fuel-injected engines.

In 2001, the radical V-Rod was conceived to replace the traditional roar and shake with smooth power from a fuel-injected 115hp engine developed by Porsche, making it the first Harley to be liquid cooled.

Dr Jeffrey Bleustein, who is neither a Harley nor a Davidson descendant, was one of the 13 executives that bought Harley from AMF and he served as CEO until he retired in 2005. Jim Zeimer, a 35-year Harley veteran, took over from him, but retired and was replaced by outsider (and non-rider) Keith Wandell in 2009.

Volume reduction and restructuring forced by the GFC will eliminate about 1,100 jobs over 2009 and 2010, including 800 hourly production positions and 300 non-production salaried positions.

Willie G. Davidson, now in his seventies, is the son of former H-D president William H. Davidson and the grandson of founder William A. Unsurprisingly, he grew up around Harleys.

Davidson studied design in Pasadena, California and while in that western seaboard State he became aware of bike customisation.

Before working for Harley, Davidson worked in the design department at Ford and began designing custom motorcycles as a hobby.

In 1963, he joined Harley-Davidson but met resistance from upper management over the design direction he wanted to take. Older conservative managers saw young Davidson’s designs as too radical and impractical.

The Super Glide was Harley’s first attempt at a factory custom, a response by the company, through Willie G., to the spreading popularity of choppers, cruisers and other customs. The Super Glide became a milestone in the history of Harley-Davidson and Willie G. still brings his own celebrity to the huge gatherings of the faithful.

The numbers of motorcycles in most parts of the world remains small relative to cars, but this may change. As oil runs low and the price of fuel increases, a modern version of the first Harley-Davidson motorcycles that achieved 188 mpg may become a model for the future.