Here is one of John Kemp Starley motor bikes i know you cant see the front of the motorbike but really the engine is the most important piece in the picture,(if you want to see full picture just click on it) it shows how basically he just put a engine into a bicycle frame.You can even see the pedals and chain as well as the engine.

Karl Benz made motor bikes but he really made cart like vehicles, they where powered by a petrol engine instead of being pulled by a horse, the steering of the carts wasn't as good as the motor bikes but the carts could hold many more people then on a motorbike.

Motor bike engines were and still are the same idea as a car engine except that a car engine probably has more cylinders then a motorbikes engine.


Above is one of Karl Benz's three wheeled chart that was powered by a engine.


Most of the earlier motor bikes were single cylinder engines which were easier to make then engines with more than one cylinder because with a engine which had more then one cylinder u have to have the two piston heads revolving at the same time and compressing the petrol at the same time and then have to have two spark plugs and because the motorbikes back then weren't very reliable back then you wanted everything simple so if you start putting two of everything its just more tings to go wrong on the bike . As the motorbikes improve and became more reliable and the engine understanding and technology became more widely spread so more people were making motorbikes, people started to put two cylinders in bikes which took some thinking on how they were going to do it without the engine in the bike being huge . People realized that if they could put two pistons onto the crankshaft , the two pistons would be revolving at the same speed so there isn't any need of having another engine or any thing , its all inside the same engine and wasn't huge .

Soon after motorbikes became slightly more reliable people started to race them .Racing became very popular very quickly.Now that people could build motor bike and for the bikes to be reasonably reliable the focus changed from building the motor bikes to trying to find out how to make them go faster , it was all about speed now .

There was a pause of the racing end of things during world War one, racing bikes weren't make nearly as much the manics were sent to work on tanks and other vehicles.After the war it took a while for the racing to get going again.