Today in motorcycle history, September 24, 1948
Motorcycle builder Soichiro Honda incorporates the Honda Motor Company in Hamamatsu, Japan.
In the 1960's, the company achieved worldwide fame for its motorcycles but, before he founded the company that bores his name, Soichiro Honda was a bit of a drifter and a dreamer. He bounced from one mechanic's job to another, and also worked as a babysitter, a race car driver and an amateur distiller. Even his wife said he was a "wizard at hardly working." In 1946, he took over an old factory that lay mostly in ruins from wartime bombings, though he did not have much of a plan for what he would do there. First he tried building what he called a "rotary weaving machine"; next he tried to mass-produce frosted glass windows, then woven bamboo roof panels. Finally, after he came across a cache of surplus two-stroke motors, he had an idea: motorbikes.
Honda adapted the motors to run on turpentine and affixed them to flimsy cycle frames built by workers at the Hamamatsu factory. The bikes sold like hotcakes to people desperate for a way to get around in postwar Japan, where there was virtually no gasoline and no real public transportation. Soon enough, Honda had sold out of those old engines and was making his own. In 1947, the factory produced its first complete motorbike, the one-half horsepower A-Type (nicknamed "The Chimney" because it was so smoky). After the company's incorporation, Honda produced a more sophisticated bike: the 1949 steel-framed, front and rear suspended D-Type that could go as fast as 50 miles per hour. At the end of the 1950's, it introduced the Cub, a Vespa clone that was especially popular with women and was the first Honda product to be sold in the United States. The Super Cub had a four-stroke single cylinder engine ranging in size from 49cc to 109cc. Having been in continuous manufacture since 1958, with production surpassing 60 million mark, the Super Cub is the most produced motor vehicle in history. The Super Cub's US advertising campaign, "You meet the nicest people on a Honda", had a lasting impact on Honda's image and on American attitudes about motorcycling, and is considered a classic case study in marketing.
Then came the Dream...ahh, the Dream and its 305cc engine and it's cousin the Scrambler. Did you know the engine was studied, and developed and enlarged by the Laverda factory as the basis of their 650cc and 750cc twin cylinder engines.
To add to their growing legacy, the 1969 CB750. The bike is recognized as the four-cylinder sport bike that had a lasting impact and is often called the first superbike.
In 1974 Honda's next attempt at world domination would come as the GL1000, the Gold Wing.
Soichiro Honda was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 1989 (don't forget he also is responsible for the Civic). He died two years later at the age of 84.
