Best known today for his creation of some of the world’s earliest cars, Gottlieb Daimler first used his patented gasoline engine in the service of a smaller vehicle, a newly-created safety bicycle, with equal-size front and rear wheels (itself an outgrowth of the earlier “penny-farthing” pedal-powered bikes with the oversized front wheels). Daimler’s creation came 18 years after Sylvester Roper of New Hampshire built a steam-powered version, reportedly achieving speeds upward of 40 miles per hour in public demonstrations, but as his invention was not very popular, Daimler is usually credited with bringing the world the motorcycle.

On this day, November 10, in 1885, Gottlieb Daimler created his first motorcycle, powered by a one-cylinder, and possibly with a spray-carburetor that his assistant, Wilhelm Maybach, was working on.

After the Roper steam-cycle, which seemed designed to injure, built as it was on the “bone-crusher” oversize-wheel chassis and with a high-pressure steam tank right under the seat, the first motorcycle in America came four years before the Harley Davidson. The Orient-Aster motorcycle, built by the Metz Company in Waltham, Massachusetts, copied a German design. It went on the market in 1898.