Picture story: The father of Indian (and where he got his idea)

This is George Hendee (1866-1943). George was a very successful bicycle racer – he won 302 of the 309 races he entered – who was inspired by the motorised bicycles (or ‘dernies’) used for pace-setting to build a mass-produced derny for the public.

By 1901 he had a prototype; by 1912 his firm – by then called Indian – was the largest motorcycle manufacturer in the world. Hendee quit the firm in 1916 at the age of 49, to breed Guernsey cattle and White leghorn chickens on his farm in Connecticut. In the gallery are a series of pictures, dating from 1908, of the factory Hendee built, and the motorcycle manufacturing behemoth Indian would become by 1940, by which time Hendee had just three years to live.