One cannot argue that The Harley-Davidson Motorcycle became American history  in it's own right since 1903, which all began from a backyard shed into a future American dream for William Harley and Arthur & Walter Davidson.  

I will only endeavour to provide a honest account and my tribute to Harley & Davidson.  An amazing story of three determined young American men who simply had a vision and the dreams to succeed.  A story always worthy of listening too

In the Beginning ... it would only be fair to comment that men only dreamed of making a vehicle that was powered by an internal combustion engine and many had tried to make their dreams a reality. 

History of the motorcycle reveals..."The craze had begun in Europe in 1885, when two Germans, Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz, working independently within sixty miles of each other, developed  Cologne engineer Nikolaus Otto.

Daimler's Einspur ("single-track") two wheeler is considered the first motorcycle; Benz's little three-wheeler is credited with being a primitive automobile. This trio--Otto, Benz, and Daimler, in the company with Wilhelm Maybach (who, with Daimler, developed the basis of modern carburetion)--launched civilization into the era of powered automobiles, boats, and aircrafts."

Amongst a handful of brilliant minds the turn of the century was the beginning of a taste of technology that was yet to come.

"The Safety bicycle developed by the English Rover company in Coventry in 1885 had offered enormous impetus to modern transportation. Chain driven, with equal-sized wheels fore and aft, and employing the all-metal construction and wire-spoked wheels first seen on the Ariel bicycle fifteen years earlier, the Safety bicycle was a major hit. By the early 1890s, four million Americans, men and women alike, were astride bicycles, and the industry, led by Massachusetts industrialist Albert Pope, was generating revenues of $60 million a year."

In the spring of 1903 a young Harley and Davidson produced their first motorcycle taking the world by storm but such a glory was to be over-shadowed by a pair of bicycle mechanics, Wilbur and Orville Wright from Dayton, Ohio who took some of that limelight with a crude machine named 'Flyer 1'.   This machine was "powered by a twelve-horsepower engine that would leave the ground for 120 feet at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina." 

"In Detroit, a few hundred miles east of Milwaukee across Lake Michigan, Henry Ford, following a series of false starts, incorporated the Ford Motor Company and began production of a small eight-horsepower Model A two-seater that would be sold to 658 customers within the first twelve months. The age of the gasoline engine was about to accelerate to maximum speed."

For a person to imagine that almost simultaneously at the turn of the century, in three different locations, the motorcycle, airplane and car was  born.  It was going to be a new world of gasoline powered transportation and William Harley and the Davidson brothers were right there and saw a vision that would make them a household name.

It had all begun with Harley and Arthur Davidson who worked at "Barth Manufacturing, a small Milwaukee machine shop, when, in the late 1890s, a German draftsman named Emil Kruger showed them drawings of French single-cylinder De Dion-Bouton engine based on the Otto principle. The pair then began creating their own patterns for a small engine , not for a motorcycle but to power a small boat. Arthur Davidson had some patterns for neighbor Ole Evinrude, who is credited with creating the first outboard motor, and the connection is logical, although within a year the young pair had transferred their energies to building an engine to serve as auxiliary power for a bicycle."

They were logically  convinced that "motorized bicycles, or "motorcycles," could serve as reliable transportation for the masses.", but they weren't the only brilliant minds that saw the same vision. "A pair of Springfield, Massachusetts, businessmen named George Hendee and Oscar Hedstrom, who in 1901teamed up to build Indian motorcycles--and were destined to become archrivals of the Milwaukee trio."

The race was on and the "English manufacturers were entering the motorcycle business, including such brands as Excelsior (1896), Matchless (1899), Ariel and Norton (1902), and J.A.P. (1903), all whom would endure to struggle with Harley-Davidson for market share in the decades to come."

The trio might not have had a "particular design or  mechanical ingenuity. They were uneducated technically, had little or no financial resources and no reputation in the business world. Beyond being intelligent young men with a bent for mechanics, they were virtually interchangeable with literally thousands of workaday Americans dreaming of glory in the burgeoning business of motorized transport."

1903-1907 Harley and Davidson knew their American dream could be realized and they were bent on succeeding.

Footnote: Harley-Davidson and the search for the American Soul, by Brock Yates. (Little, Brown  and Company Boston New York London) 1999.