Motorcycle builder Soichiro Honda incorporated the Honda Motor Company in Hamamatsu, Japan in 1948.
Soichiro Honda was a bit of a drifter and a dreamer before the company that bears his name came along. He bounced from one mechanic’s job to another and also worked as a babysitter, a racing car driver and an amateur distiller. Even Mrs Honda said he was a “wizard at hardly working.”
In 1946, he took over an old factory that lay mostly in ruins from wartime bombings,without much of a plan of what he would do there. First he tried building what he called a ‘rotary weaving machine’. Next he tried to mass-produce frosted glass windows, then woven bamboo roof panels. Finally, after he came across a cache of surplus two-stroke motors, he had an idea - motorbikes.
Honda adapted the motors to run on turpentine and fitted them to flimsy cycle frames built by workers at the Hamamatsu factory. The bikes sold like hotcakes to people desperate for a way to get around in post-war Japan, where there was virtually no petrol and no real public transportation.
Honda quickly sold out of those old engines and began making his own. In 1947, the factory produced its first complete motorbike, the one-half horsepower A-Type (nicknamed “The Chimney” because it was so smoky).
After the company’s incorporation, Honda produced a more sophisticated bike, the 1949 steel-framed, front and rear suspended D-Type that could go as fast as 50 miles per hour. At the end of the 1950’s it introduced the Cub; a Vespa clone that was particularly popular with women and was the first Honda product to be sold in the United States.