KNIGHT EATON | 1893 | Australia :
The name Knight Eaton belongs to a single episode at the very beginning of Australian motorcycle history, and its place in that history rests on a brief and not entirely successful experiment that preceded the arrival of any imported powered two-wheeler in the country by more than two years.
The first attempt at building a motor bicycle in Australia is believed to have been in Brisbane by Mr Knight Eaton, manager of the Brisbane office of the Austral Cycle Agency in 1893. By all accounts it was not a very successful attempt, with the motor attached to the back of a bicycle behind the rear wheel.
The context for this experiment was the cycling boom of the early 1890s, a period when the safety bicycle had recently displaced the penny-farthing and bicycle businesses were flourishing across the Australian colonies. The Austral Cycle Agency, for which Knight Eaton managed the Brisbane office, was part of that commercial world. The impulse to attach a motor to a bicycle and attempt to make it self-propelled was one being felt by experimenters across Britain, Europe and North America at exactly this moment, as the pioneer motorcycle took its first uncertain shapes in workshops and machine shops around the world. That a Brisbane cycle agency manager was making his own attempt in 1893 places him in the same broad wave of experimentation, even if the colonial context gave him far fewer resources and references than his European counterparts.
The positioning of the motor behind the rear wheel was mechanically logical in one sense, keeping the engine close to the driving wheel, but practically problematic. Weight distribution, steering and transmission were all more difficult with this arrangement than with the engine-ahead-of-the-pedals configuration that was simultaneously proving itself in the 1901 New Werner, and it helps explain why the attempt was not successful.
The very first motor bicycle brought into Australia arrived in Brisbane in late 1895, imported by the Austral Cycle Agency for Mr J.C. Brunnich of Mackay, about 970 kilometres north of Brisbane. The machine was on display in the Agency’s Queen Street shop window until February 1896 when enough benzol, a by-product of coal tar, was acquired from Sydney to power the bicycle. The man with responsibility for operating that imported machine when it was demonstrated publicly was H. Knight Eaton himself, the same person who had attempted to build one from scratch three years before. The machine created quite a scene when ridden around the streets of Brisbane before it left to tour the rest of the country.
Knight Eaton therefore appears at both ends of this foundational moment in Australian motorcycle history: as the builder of the first attempted motor bicycle in the country in 1893, and as the rider who introduced the first imported machine to Brisbane’s streets in 1896. The 1893 attempt was acknowledged even at the time as unsuccessful, and it left no surviving machine. Its significance is entirely historical, as the earliest documented effort to create a powered two-wheeler on Australian soil.
