History
In the 1880s, Hotchkiss, Mayo & Meek Ltd was established in Coventry as a manufacturer of bicycles. In 1897, the company name was changed to Coventry-Eagle when John Meek left the company.
From 1898, like many bicycle manufacturers they began experimenting by adding small petrol-engines to their heavier bicycle frames. By 1899 they produced their first motorcycle, manufactured along bicycle lines from carefully manufactured components. By the start of World War 1, the range included Villiers and JAP engines. Sourcing engines from four manufacturers post the war into the 1920s, during the depression of the 1930s the company concentrated on producing two-strokes. Production of motorcycles continued until the start of the World War 2 in 1939.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To history therefore I must refer for answer, in which it would be an unhappy passage indeed, which should shew by what fatal indulgence of subordinate views and passions, a contest for an atom had defeated well founded prospects of giving liberty to half the globe.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)