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| John Starley invented the Rover bicycle but died before car marque was founded |
In 1877, John Kemp Starley and William Sutton set up business as Starley and Sutton of Coventry to make bicycles. Their 1884 tricycle was called the Rover, and this name proved so popular that the firm became known as the Rover Cycle Company in 1896. It was an innovative company: the Safety Bicycle of 1885 was the first pushbike to have a chain driving the rear wheels, which marked huge progress from the old 'penny-farthing' front-wheel drive bikes and set the template for bicycles as we know them today. In 1888, Starley added batteries to a tricycle to make the 'Coventry Chair', an early motor vehicle prototype described by Autocar magazine as "we believe, the first motor machine made in Coventry". This was tested in France, as British law at that time still required a man with a red flag to travel in front of each motorised vehicle. Interested in the growing automobile industry, Starley became a director in the Grose Gear Company, a firm formed in Northampton in 1897 by his friend James Grose. Grose imported and sold cars from Benz, Leon Bollee, Daimler and De Dion Bouton, and in 1899, he and Starley built and sold a number of their own Benz-engined cars under the Grose brand.
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| Rover 8hp: a world-first with its central backbone chassis |
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Starley died in 1901, long after Sutton had pulled out of the Rover Company, but the firm continued, making motorcycles as well as bikes. Edmund Lewis, then the chief engineer for Daimler, was said to have designed Rover's first motorbike, the Imperial (1903) in his spare time; at the end of that year, the Rover board voted to employ Lewis full-time to design an own-brand car. Lewis designed a single-cylinder 8hp model which featured a world first: a central backbone chassis structure, with integrated rear axle. The first prototype was completed and announced to the press on 1st July 1904; it went on sale on 1st December 1904, and became Britain's best-selling car.
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