"When 73-year-old Sylvester Roper showed up at a local bicycle track in Boston aboard this machine—a steam-powered motorcycle he invented—the young bicycle racers just laughed. Here was this old man riding a strange contraption who wanted to race the local hotshots around the one-third-mile Charles River Park track. It wasn’t until the race was on that they realized the old man had come up with something truly amazing."
Frame
1894 Columbia
High Frame
racing bicycle
Engine
Coal-fired boiler
Top Speed
More than
40 mph
Wet Weight
150 lbs
Owner
Robert "Buck" Boudeman
Roper died while taking his bike out for a ride.
"The machine was cutting out a lively pace on the back stretch when the men seated near the training quarters noticed the bicycle was unsteady,” the paper said. “The forward wheel wobbled, and then suddenly, the cycle was deflected from its course and plunged off the track into the sand, throwing the rider and overturning."
For more, read the rest of the story here.
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