Not Harley, Not Indian: The True First American Motorcycle Was the 1898 Orient-Aster

Ask anyone about America's oldest motorcycle and they'll probably say Harley-Davidson or Indian. Those are the names everybody knows, right? And if you're guessing, Harley seems like the obvious answer just because it's so famous.

Nope. Harley didn't start until 1903. Indian actually beat them—kicked off in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1901. But neither of them was first.

The actual first one? You've probably never heard of it. Some guy named Charles H. Metz started the Waltham Manufacturing Company in Waltham, Massachusetts back in 1893. He'd been making watches before that and decided to start building bicycles because everyone was obsessed with them.

He called his bike the Orient-Aster, or just Orient. Got the name from an old insurance job he had plus the company that made his engine. In 1898, he stuck a knockoff French engine onto one of his bikes. That De Dion-Bouton engine design was what pretty much everyone copied back then, including Indian.

It Started With Racing

Here's what's cool—Metz didn't do this to sell motorcycles. He just wanted his bicycle racing team to go faster. Guy was actually a champion highwheel bike racer in New York back in 1885. As his team kept winning, people started buying his Orient bicycles because they were legit good. And yeah, bicycle racing was huge in America back then. Weird to think about now.

Metz got really into building faster bikes and made a bunch with three and four wheels. His 1899 catalog was the first time anyone actually wrote the word "motorcycle" the way we say it now. Before that everyone just called them motor-bicycles.

First time people saw the Orient race was July 31, 1900 at the Charles River Speedway. It won, and that became the first official motorcycle race in America. Most historians figure it was the first real production motorcycle made here too.

So there you go. Not Harley, not Indian. The Orient beat them both, and pretty much nobody knows about it anymore.