Family Affair
FAMILY AFFAIR
FOUR MEN, ONE DREAM
IF YOU WERE A YOUNG PERSON AT THE TURN OF THE CENTUry with some mechanical aptitude, an interest in the internal-combustion engine, and the good fortune to live in a manufacturing center where the materials you needed were available, you might have set out to build a flying machine or a horseless carriage...or a motor bicycle. And maybe we'd be celebrating the 90th anniversary of your company today. But the odds are against it.
The Harley-Davidson story begins in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, about 1901, when two boyhood friends and bicycling enthusiasts-William S. Harley, then 21, and Arthur Davidson, then 20-decided to try building a motorized bicycle. At that time, both young men were working in the same manufacturing concern, Harley as a draftsman, Davidson as a patternmaker. At work, they met a newly emigrated German draftsman who had shop drawings of a De Dion engine from the Aster company in France where he had been employed.
So the two young men knew bicycles, they had an actual engine design to study and access to technical information in publications of the day, and they had friends like the German draftsman and Ole Evinrude (yes, that Evinrude) who could offer assistance.
What they didn’t have was much in the way of time, money or equipment. Their motorcycle was an after-hours project conducted in a basement workshop. At some point, the pair discovered they couldn’t take the project further without the help of a skilled mechanic, so they lured Arthur’s brother Walter Davidson, who was working as a railroad machinist in Kansas, by promising him a ride on their motorcycle. Walter discovered he would have to help build the motorcycle before he could ride it, but he decided to stay anyway, taking a railroad job in Milwaukee to support himself. The eldest Davidson brother, William, then a toolroom foreman at a railroad shop in Milwaukee, also pitched in. The motorcycle company that had yet to become a reality was from the start very much a family affair.
By the time the four men had a motorcycle to produce, they had already
moved from their basement to the small workshop of a friend, where they had access to a lathe and drill press. Production would require more space, so the Davidsons’ father, William C., a cabinet maker, built the first factory in his backyard. It was a 10 x 15-foot shed with “HarleyDavidson Motor Company” painted on the door-William Harley’s name coming first to give him top billing for designing the motorcycle. After the production of three motorcycles there in 1903, Harley-Davidson became not just a dream with a name, but a reality.
The story of the next few years can be reduced to two words: growth and development. Increasing production required that the factory grow. In 1904, H-D produced eight machines in a shed that had doubled in size. The size doubled again in 1905. If this kept up, Mr. Davidson would soon have no backyard, so the young men secured a loan from an uncle in Madison, Wisconsin, and bought a parcel of land on what is now called Juneau Avenue, the current site of H-D’s corporate offices, and erected a new factory measuring 28 x 80 feet. This was in 1906, and production that year totaled 50 machines. By this time, the three Davidsons and Harley had quit their other jobs and had hired employees to help meet the demands of production.
The Motor Company formally incorporated in 1907, by which time production had tripled to 150 machines. By 1908, H-D’s Single had grown from 25 to 35 cubic inches and was an indisputable success. 1909 brought another doubling in factory size, and the 35 employees produced 1000 machines that year, 27 of which were the company’s first-and unsuccessful-V-Twin. In 1910 came Harley’s first reinforced-concrete building, housing 149 employees who turned out 3200 motorcycles. During this year, the engineers went back to the drawing board to remedy the problems with the first V-Twin, and when the new model was released in 1911, it worked as planned.
So in less than a decade, Harley and the Davidsons had gone from backyard tinkerers to motorcycle manufacturers. There would be ups and downs in the company’s next 82 years, and the odds were stacked heavily against the little company, but in 1993 HarleyDavidson stands as the sole survivor of what once was a group of some 300 U.S. 'motorcycle manufacturers. Truly a feat worth celebrating.
David Johnson
