Megola

A Munich crowd in the early 1920s watching a Megola roll past for the first time must have had a hard time believing what they were looking at. There was no visible engine, no chain, no gearbox lever to speak of — just a front wheel that seemed to be doing something a wheel shouldn't do, spinning around a five-cylinder radial engine bolted into its own hub. It looked less like a motorcycle than a piece of aviation hardware that had wandered onto the street. In a way, that was the point.

Origins

The machine came out of a partnership formed in Munich around 1920, built on the engineering instincts of Friedrich Gockerell — born in 1889, and a man who spelled his own name "Cockerell" for most of his career before adjusting it for the venture that made him briefly famous. Gockerell had already made a name for himself as a motorcycle racer and had cut his teeth in engine work at Rapp Motorenwerke, the firm that would eventually become BMW. He brought the design; Otto Landgraf brought technical execution; and a partner named Hans Meixner brought, and helped arrange, the financing, reportedly with the assistance of a Swiss bank. What is agreed upon is the mechanism by which the company got its name: Megola was assembled from the first letters of the three partners' surnames, with Gockerell's spelling nudged to "Cockerell" to make the acronym work.

Before there was a company, there was an idea, and the idea had already gone through at least two rounds of testing. Gockerell built a prototype called the PAX in 1918, a machine with a three-cylinder engine housed in the rear wheel — an early, rougher version of the concept that would later define Megola. By 1920 he had moved to a five-cylinder layout, still mounted in the rear wheel. These were prototypes, not production machines, but they show that the wheel-mounted engine wasn't a gimmick arrived at overnight. It was the product of at least two years of iteration before the Megola name was ever painted on a fuel tank.

The Early Machines

By the time the company reorganized as Megola Motoren Aktiengesellschaft in 1921, the engine had migrated from the rear wheel to the front, and the layout that would define the marque was set: a 640cc air-cooled five-cylinder radial engine, built directly into the hub of the front wheel, with side valves worked into the hub itself. There was no clutch. There was no gearbox in the conventional sense — power went straight through a single fixed ratio, which meant starting the bike involved either pushing it or hoisting it onto a stand and spinning the front wheel by hand until the engine caught. None of this was normal, even by the freewheeling engineering standards of the early 1920s, and that was exactly what made the Megola a talking point in Munich showrooms and at trade demonstrations.

The bodywork hid a second oddity: two fuel tanks. A larger reserve tank sat concealed within the bike's pressed-steel bodywork, and fuel had to be hand-pumped from it up to a smaller feed tank mounted above the engine, from which gravity did the rest. For a machine this strange mechanically, Megola nonetheless equipped its motorcycles like a company confident in its own competence — a fuel gauge, tachometer, and ammeter came as standard, at a time when plenty of competitors were still selling motorcycles with nothing more than a speedometer, if that.

Two versions were offered from early on. The Touring model was the comfort-minded machine — a broad, cushioned seat with a chair-like profile, rear suspension, and a top speed around 85 km/h, built for riders who wanted distance covered without punishment. The Sport model stripped the suspension out of the rear end and firmed everything up in exchange for real performance, reaching a claimed 142 km/h, a startling number for a five-cylinder 640cc machine with a single fixed gear and no clutch to speak of.

The Defining Era

Everything Megola is remembered for happened inside roughly four years, between 1921 and 1925, all of it out of Munich. That narrow window happened to land squarely inside a period of German design thinking that prized function, industrial materials, and mechanical honesty — the Bauhaus era, broadly speaking — and the Megola, whatever else it was, fit that mood. It didn't disguise its engineering the way most motorcycles did. The wheel was the engine. There was nothing to hide behind, and the company didn't try to hide it. Contemporary observers saw in it a kind of utopian confidence about where mechanical design was heading.

What made the Megola more than a curiosity was that it actually worked as a motorcycle. Putting the engine mass directly in the front wheel gave the machine an unusually low center of gravity for its era, and despite what should have been an alarming amount of rotating weight up front, riders and racers found it handled better than the layout had any right to suggest. It wasn't unstable or twitchy. It was, by most contemporary accounts, remarkably composed — which is likely the only reason the design got taken seriously at all rather than dismissed as a novelty.

Racing

Megola didn't build this thing to sit quietly in showrooms, and the factory backed a proper works effort with riders Toni Bauhofer, Sepp Stelzer, and Albin Tommasi carrying the brand through German and European road races and reliability trials. The results justified the effort. In 1924, Bauhofer won the over-500cc class at the German Motorcycle Road Championship on a Megola Sport — a result that effectively made Megola a championship-winning marque in the first year of what would eventually evolve into Germany's modern domestic road racing series. Bauhofer also pushed a Sport model to 142 km/h on the Avus circuit in Berlin, a banked, high-speed course that had a way of exposing any motorcycle with dubious handling. The Megola did not embarrass itself.

For a company running a genuinely unconventional drivetrain — one fixed gear, no clutch, an engine you couldn't simply swap out the way you would a conventional powerplant — this run of competitive results mattered. It gave Megola something beyond novelty appeal: proof that the front-wheel radial engine wasn't just an engineering party trick but a layout that could win races against motorcycles built along entirely orthodox lines.

Ownership and Survival

The path to production wasn't free of financial scar tissue. Around the time Otto Landgraf joined the venture, an earlier agreement had been struck with Mars of Nuremberg, another motorcycle manufacturer; that arrangement fell apart in 1919, and by one family account the cost of unwinding it ran to 100,000 Marks — a serious sum, and a reminder that Megola's engineering audacity was underwritten by some genuinely painful business decisions before the company had sold a single production motorcycle.

There's also a persistent point of confusion worth clearing up: although Megola was formally set up in Munich in 1921, by 1923 the company was operating with Swiss documentation and a Zurich address alongside its Munich one. This has led some to assume Megolas were built in Switzerland. They were not. The Zurich address appears to have been an administrative or financing arrangement tied to the Swiss bank involved in the original funding, and the service manuals of the period simply listed both addresses. Every Megola motorcycle was built in Munich.

The company's end came the way so many small, ambitious German manufacturers of the era ended — not through a design failure or a scandal, but through the mid-1920s financial crisis that swept through Germany and starved smaller manufacturers of capital and customers alike. Production stopped in 1925. Megola was never revived, and the company passed quietly out of existence. Gockerell himself didn't stop building motorcycles; he went on to produce lightweight machines under the Cockerell name, applying lessons learned from a project that had, whatever its commercial fate, proven he could build something nobody else was building.

Sources differ somewhat on exact totals, but by most accounts, something in the low thousands of Megolas were built and sold during the roughly four-year production run between 1921 and 1925. Whatever the precise number, survival rates have been brutal. Only a small number of genuine Megolas — commonly cited at around fifteen — are known to exist today, which places them firmly in the category of motorcycles collectors chase for decades rather than motorcycles that turn up at a local swap meet.

The Marque Today

Megola builds no motorcycles now and hasn't for a century, but its reputation has, if anything, grown stranger and more respected with distance. In 1998, a Megola was included in "The Art of the Motorcycle," the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's exhibition in New York, placed there alongside machines chosen specifically because they blurred the line between industrial design and sculpture. For a motorcycle built by a small Munich firm that lasted barely four years, that's a striking afterlife.

Surviving examples rarely change hands, and when they do, they draw serious money and serious scrutiny — these are museum pieces and collector trophies now, not runners you'd take to a weekend rally, though a determined few owners do exactly that. What keeps Megola in conversation among enthusiasts isn't nostalgia so much as genuine engineering respect: nobody else built a production motorcycle quite like it, and nobody since has seriously tried. The five-cylinder radial in the front wheel remains one of those ideas that sounds like it shouldn't have worked, was executed anyway, and — for one brief, strange run through the early 1920s — actually did.