Gotttlieb Wilhelm Daimler's Reitwagen ("riding wagon") or…

Gotttlieb Wilhelm Daimler's Reitwagen ("riding wagon") or Einspur ("single track") is a motor vehicle made by Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach in 1885, is widely recognized as the first motorcycle.

Daimler was the son of a baker named Johannes Däumler (Daimler) and his wife Frederika, from the town of Schorndorf near Stuttgart, Württemberg.

By the age of thirteen (1847), he had completed six years of primary studies in Lateinschule and became interested in engineering.

The next year, he began an apprenticeship with a carbine maker, Raithel.

He graduated in 1852, passing the craft test with a pair of engraved double-barreled pistols.

The same year, at eighteen, Daimler decided to take up mechanical engineering, abandoning gunsmithing, and left his hometown.

Signing up at Stuttgart's School for Advanced Training in the Industrial Arts, under the tutelage of Ferdinand Steinbeis, Daimler was studious, even taking extra Sunday morning classes.

With Steinbeis' assistance, Daimler got work in 1853 at "the factory college", F. Rollé und Schwilque in Grafenstaden, so-called because its manager, Friedrich Messmer, had been an instructor at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

Daimler performed well, and when Rollé und Schwilque began making railway locomotives in 1856, the twenty-two-year-old Daimler was named foreman.

Instead of staying, Daimler took two years at Stuttgart Polytechnical Institute to hone his skills, gaining an in-depth grasp of steam locomotives, as well as "a profound conviction" steam that was destined to be superseded.

He conceived small, cheap, simple engines for light industrial use, possibly inspired by the newly developed gas engines of that era.

Therefore, in 1861, he resigned from Rollé und Schwilque, visiting Paris, and going on to England, where he worked with the country's top engineering firms, becoming knowledgeable with machine tools.

He spent from autumn 1861 to summer 1863 at Beyer, Peacock and Company of Gorton, Manchester. (Beyer was from Saxony.)

While in London, he visited the 1862 World Fair, where one of the exhibits was a steam carriage.

These carriages did not evidently inspire him, however, for his wish was to produce machine tools and woodworking machinery.

Daimler next went to work for Maschinenfabrik Staub, Geislingen, where he designed tools, mills, and turbines.

In 1863, he joined the Bruderhaus Reutlingen, a Christian Socialist toolmaker, as inspector and later executive.

While there, he met Wilhelm Maybach, a fifteen-year old orphan.

Thanks to Daimler's organizational skills, the factory had managed to show a profit, but he quit in frustration in 1869, joining Maschinenbau Gesellschaft Karlsruhe in July.

Daimler and Maybach had moved in August 1872, to work at the world's largest manufacturer of stationary engines at the time, the Deutz-AG-Gasmotorenfabrik in Cologne.

It was half-owned by Nikolaus Otto, who was looking for a new technical director.

As directors, both Daimler and Otto had focused on gas-engine development while Maybach is chief designer.