| J&P Cycles |
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| Offers more than 50,000 motorcycle parts, accessories, clothing and gifts online and ready for sale. Motorbikes are part of our culturally established inventory of adventure items, tools and transport means for quite a while, already; in fact, some adventurers reached fame thanks, in part for having being bikers. One of those was John Glenn, who during the first years of the twentieth century surpassed 216 km/h using a special motorbike. His record earned him the nickname 'the fastest man on Earth,' and it was a just name and indeed was true for quite a while, so one just has to compare what a motorcycle was in relative terms during those days, for today, such records belong only to astronauts and cosmonauts. But Curtiss was more than a bike rider gone mad: he was an adventurer and an opportunist, because when he saw what the Wright brothers had achieved, he decided to compete with them an din fact, became their archrival, seeking to nullify the patent rights that the brothers from Dayton, Ohio had laboriously earned with their research and inventions. The thing was that Curtiss did not want to pay them any royalties for the aircraft that he planned to build, so he tried everything, including legal proceedings which he ultimately lost, and some other quite questionable methods. He indeed died being a millionaire, dealing with high-value real estate in the Miami area during times I which those were overvalued due to speculation. But that was not what made him a millionaire but WWI: after working with Alexander Graham Bell as a test pilot, he went on to become an aircraft manufacturer without paying anything to the Wrights despite the fact that he had to. World War I meant an exception decreed by the government of the United States in terms of royalties and patent rights, so Mr. Curtiss went on happily winning contracts with the armed forces and supplying them with thousands of airplanes without paying a dime for any patent. |
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