The teens and twenties are approaching their centenary, and it’s interesting to be able to ride a machine that’s a hundred years old. So this design became obsolete quite quickly …although now, fortunately, eighty or ninety years on, new generations are discovering these original designs once again. Of course, the style of the motorcycles that they reflected had also changed by the thirties.
In similar fashion, in America the 28-inch wheeled ‘motorbike’ of the 1910s and 1920s was superseded by the aerodynamic 26-inch wheeled ‘balloon tyre’ bike. In Great Britain, lightweight bicycles became the ‘new classics’ in the thirties. These early bicycles are referred to as classic Schwinns by many people this is hard to argue, and they are very valuable, but some of the models that came later seem to posses even more inherent classicness.’ Most of these early antique bicycles will have ‘The World’ imprinted on the head badge, along with the glue-on tire-and-rim setup. Also as a result of team racing, tandems, quads and even fiver-man quints were built in the Schwinn factory. To quote the book Classic Schwinn Bicycles by William Love, describing the first style of Motorbike: ‘Through the 1910s and 1920s, these basic models filled Schwinn’s lineup, although some 24-inch and 26-inch tire models were added to the 28-inch line. It has the later style of chainwheel, so I assume it’s closer to the 1932 model, probably late twenties. I’m not sure of the age of mine (company records don’t exist for this era). ‘The World’ was a range of bicycle they’d produced since before the turn of the century.īy the way, the leather thing wrapped around the tank is a gaiter, often worn around the ankle on the chain side of a bicycle with exposed chain to prevent your trousers getting dirty.Ībove is the 1917 Schwinn World Motorbike, and below is the 1932 version. Schwinn bought Henderson to give the company a top motorcycle division, and also continued to dominate the bicycle market, with dozens of different badges, many reflecting the companies they’d taken over since the 1890s. While other cycle manufacturers diversified into motorcycle and car production, Schwinn’s cycle division expanded rapidly. Many were made by third-party companies such as Davis, and badged accordingly as they left the factory. Top American manufacturers such as Harley Davidson, Indian, Excelsior, etc sold these ‘motorbikes’ (also sometimes called ‘motobikes’) alongside their regular motorcycles. The ‘tank’ is actually a toolbox, with an opening flap on one side (below). With their dummy tanks, they were designed to look like real motorcycles. The ‘Motorbike’ style of bicycle took off in America in the 1910s at the same time as powered motorcycles.
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