The Honda story is the story of one man, Soichiro Honda, and his unparalleled achievement of bringing motor cycles to the masses. Soichiro Honda was a racer, a businessman, and a manufacturer. But most of all he was a dreamer. He dreamed of a better way of making piston rings, founded a small company, and began production. He dreamed of giving people everywhere an economical form of transportation, and began producing small motorcycles, including one built in 1949 called the D-Type Dream.
He also loved racing too. So his company built bigger and faster machines, two, four, five and six-cylinder race bikes and won the Isle of Man.
Honda Motor Company is by far the world's biggest motorcycle maker. Honda's first motorcycle was born out of necessity in immediate post World War II Japan, where public transportation was desperately overcrowded and gasoline severely restricted.
Looking for a solution to his, and thousands of others', personal transport problems, Honda came across a job lot of 500 war surplus two-stroke motors designed to power electric generators; nobody else wanted them so Honda picked them up cheap.
His aim was to adapt them for attachment to push-bikes and, by October 1946, his small factory in Hamamatsu was making complete, makeshift motor bikes using proprietary cycle frames. Because gasoline was in short supply, Honda adapted his motors to run on turpentine, a fuel that he himself distilled from pine trees and sold throughout Japan. Turpentine (or gas thinned out with turpentine) was not the best thing for powering motorbikes, and required a lot of strenuous pedaling to warm the engine up enough before you could get going.
Honda's first bikes were very successful and supplies of the surplus engines ran out after a few months. Business was good by then, so he decided to manufacture his own motors. Using the surplus motor as a model, Honda designed and built his own 50cc engine.
