The Riotte Kerosene Bicycle Motor

While I’m working out the plot for my new book, I’m also trying to figure out what exactly the machine my heroine’s father has invented looks like. I have in mind for it to be an early motorcycle, but my knowledge of motorcycles and motors past and present is minimal. Fortunately my reliable friends at Google have scanned in volume 1 of The Horseless Age, a publication for the nascent automotive industry in 1895. There are a great many bicycle, tricycle and carriage motors described, from steam-powered to gasoline, and spring-motors, which were coiled by a hand-crank and then powered a bicycle for 15 miles. I was briefly excited by the description of an ether-motor–more efficient and powerful than using water for steam–until I looked a little further and learned that ether is extremely explosive, which is why we don’t see it used as a propellant in many engines these days. There will be some mishaps in the novel, but not the explosion and full-body burns sort of disaster.

Right now the leading contender for me to base my fictional motorcycle off of is a kerosene motor, a lightweight option which could be attached to a regular bicycle frame. It doesn’t seem to have caught on, as the only mention I can find is this description on page 19 of Vol. 1, No. 1 of The Horseless Age, printed in November 1895.

The Riotte Kerosene Bicycle

C.C. Riotte, of the Riotte & Hadden Mfg. Co., 462 East 136th St., New York, has invented a kerosene motor for bicycles which is extremely simple, light and inexpensive. It can be attached to any ordinary bicycle, detached at a moment’s notice, and is started and stopped by a small handle at the oil tank. It consists of two small valves, a cylinder, piston and igniter.

The operation of the motor it [sic] as follows: When the piston descends, a cylinder full of air mixed with a small quantity of kerosene oil is compressed into the explosive chamber and there ignited by an electric spark which is generated from a small battery weighing one half pound. This battery never polarizes or requires recharging.

The air in the cylinder being highly heated from the combustion of oil drives forward the piston which is connected through a crank with the rear wheel as seen in the illustration. The operation continues on, almost noiseless and without smell, with every turn of the rear wheel. A speed of twenty five miles per hour has been attained with it on level ground and a pretty good speed maintained on grades of about four or five per cent.

The weight of the motor including tank full of oil is nine and one half pounds. The tank holds enough oil to carry a person 75 miles and when the oil gives out a quart of kerosene or any kind of petroleum lamp oil can be bought at any country store or of any farmer.

Mr. Riotte has been experimenting in gas and oil engines all his life, and has had a good deal to do with stationary and marine engines of all descriptions.

The principle of this bicycle motor is the same as that of his new improved stationary oil engines except that heavy weights and the fly wheel are dispensed with.

The firm is also constructing a carriage, which is propelled by a kerosene motor the same in principle as their stationary motors. The operating gear will have but one lever to start, stop, reverse, or go at any speed from 2 to 25 miles per hour. They expect to form a company to manufacture bicycle and carriage motors on a large scale.

As far as I can tell, it seems like a pretty plausible option, especially with the option to buy fuel on the road. One of the things I’ve realized about the development of motor vehicles is that they were initially hampered by the lack of infrastructure. To be successfully used for long distance travel, they needed to have good roads for all the wheeled vehicles, and for the fueled vehicles, they needed places to buy fuel. I’ve pretty much taken the existence of gas stations for granted, but now I assume that part of what made or broke the different motor options described in The Horseless Age was the availability of their required fuel, whether it was kerosene, ether, or gasoline. It may also explain the interest in the spring motors!

Why I’m switching to romance

Over the summer, as my child started to sleep through the night and my mental powers of cognition started to return, I did some hard thinking about my writing career and which direction I want to go. I wrote a business plan. I thought about numbers and I thought about the number of stories rattling around in my head, wanting to get out. Ultimately, I decided to set aside some writing projects I’d been working on for a while and start something new and, seemingly, entirely different: historical romance. I have an eight (!!) book series planned, set in Gilded Age America — the first book is 1896 New York City.

Why romance?

I have two main reasons. First, I’m ready to write happy endings. Second, historical research is fun.

Happy Ever Afters

If you know anything about popular romances, you know that they always end with a couple happily together. Maybe with some sexy times, or maybe just with an as yet unconsummated plan to spend their lives together.

That’s not the sort of ending that I’ve written in the past. I have often written from songs, and you know what makes a good emotional song that gets stuck in my heart and my head and tickles around until it comes out as a novel? Tragic death. And you know who often dies? The lady.

I spent most of the summer reading about Spanish colonial California and working on a novella (that I thought would be a short story, but it kept growing) from the California ballad South Coast but as powerful as the story in that song is, I ultimately dropped it because it’s unavoidably about the death of a woman, who is half Native American in my mind, and you know what? Too many Native American women are dying in the present day. When I went looking for an article to link just now, Google autocomplete filled in “missing” after “native american woman” and that’s why I can’t write that story.

It’s a real pain for the Native American community and I am not going to be the one to add to that.

So that story’s in the drawer and I’m not sure I’ll ever take it out. I still love the song and I have no regrets about reading up on the Spanish and Mexican presence in Alta California. The song is tragic as all getout and the story was going to make you cry.

But so is the news, and there’s enough of that, don’t you think? I don’t think I’ve ever strayed into woman-in-refrigerator territory, but I don’t like looking back and seeing the stories I’ve written that involved dead ladies in various ways. I’m not going to write that any more.

The other draw of the Happy Ever After right now is the utopia/dystopia dichotomy in fantasy. I use fantasy here to indicate an imaginary world, which could be scifi, or Tolkienesque high fantasy, or historical fiction (which really can only be a view of the past through the lens of the present). Dystopian literature stands as a warning of future dangers, to show our characters fighting the good fight against tyranny and injustice. Utopian stories show the possibilities of a better world.

Haven’t there been a lot of popular dystopian stories lately? The Hunger Games, Game of Thrones, all that sort of rah-rah grim, dark world and brave hero(ine)s stepping up? Well, in the last year, for those of us in America with a progressive and liberal bent to our thoughts, the dystopia has become far too close to the everyday reality. We have rallied in the streets and taken up arms to fight against tyranny and corruption.

To me, writing fiction in that vein seems beside the point right now. I don’t doubt that others will take up the dystopian stories and write brilliant novels that will become our generation’s 1984, but the news makes me want utopian fiction. I can’t spend my workaday life fighting, and go back for more grimness in my leisure time. Therefore, romance and happy ever afters.

I’m not the only one feeling this way either. Romance is a progressive and feminist genre, so it’s no surprise that established romance authors are part of the resisterhood. You can read articles on the subject from Salon and Entertainment Weekly.

Historical Research is Fun

Seriously, half the reason I like writing stories is because it sends me out reading other stories. The writers’ internet is overflowing with jokes around “don’t check my browser history.” Since I’m not writing thrillers or murder mysteries I don’t have to crack wise about the FBI watching me, but I end up looking all sorts of things. Did you know that by the 1840s California was overrun by horses and cattle, and cowhides were basically used as currency? That Mrs. Lucy Carnegie, in 1894, was the first female member of the New York Yacht Club? That the florist business in early New York City was dominated by Greeks? All these facts and more I have learned recently and all these details go into making my stories come alive with verisimilitude.

Writing stories set in the 1890s is particularly fun/dangerous because Google books has scanned a vast amount of printed matter, now out of copyright, and made it available online. Do I want to know what sort of clothing my gentleman wears to a party in 1896? I search for men’s suit and restrict the years to 1890-1900 and peruse the ads of the day until I have enough clues to narrow down and choose his wardrobe. It’s tempting to just sit and read vintage periodicals, and I admit I’ve ordered a couple antique books that weren’t too expensive so I can thumb through them. I’ll be sharing some of the things I find on the blog as I continue. Not everything fits into the story, but some of it is too to pass up!