youthful and ambitious pedal cyclist was yearning for a motor.
London clubs instituted trials and hill climbing competitions on a big scale, and the advertisement obtained from these largely aided the sale of motor cycles. For a very long time the daily press was extremely cynical respecting motor cycles and, in some cases, they had cause to be. However, Rome was not
Fig. 29
THE 6-H.P. TWIN CYLINDER ROYAL ENFIELD SIDE-CAR MODEL
The engine has V type cylinders
built in a day, and if some of the incompetent critics on the daily papers had tempered the wind to the shorn lamb a little, the industry would not have been so long climbing the rungs of the ladder of success.
Up to about 1909–10 nearly every motor cycle was fitted with a four-stroke engine, as they are called to differentiate them from the two-stroke type. Briefly, the four-stroke engine has a power impulse, or explosion, every other revolution or every fourth stroke of the piston (down and up being counted as two strokes), whereas the two-stroke has an impulse every revolution or every two strokes of the piston.