Curtiss Airplanes
Glen Curtiss was born in Hammodsport, New York, in 1878. He had just turned 23 when he encountered his first motorcycle (a Thomas Auto-Bi) at Buffalo's Pan-American Exposition in 1901. As a bicycle shop owner, and compulsive tinkerer, he was intrigued.

Armed with increasingly larger Thomas mail-order engines, he jerrybuilt two motorized bicycles that summer. Within six months Curtiss was manufacturing with a local foundry, turning out single-cylinder engines from his sketches.

Audi
In 1907 the Dane Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen set up a small metal goods factory in Zschopau in the Ore Mountains

In 1919 Rasmussen built a two-stroke engine, which he marketed as a toy engine under the name “Des Knaben Wunsch” (literally: “The Boy’s Wish”). This mini-engine was enlarged and used as an auxiliary bicycle engine, and subsequently in 1922 was made into a genuine motorcycle engine known as “Das Kleine Wunder” (“The Small Miracle”). Under the auspices of Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen with Manager Carl Hahn and Chief Designer Hermann Weber, DKW developed into the world’s most important motorcycle manufacturer in the course of the 1920s – in 1928 the Zschopau plant was the largest motorcycle factory in the world. In that very year Rasmussen took over the Audi car factories in Zwickau, and two years later commissioned the Audi designers with the production of a small car with the following design features: a DKW two-cylinder two-stroke motorcycle engine with a displacement of 600 cc, a unitary wooden body with leatherette upholstery, front and rear swing axles and front-wheel drive. The DKW Front was thus born, becoming one of the best-selling and most popular German small cars of its time

Duesenberg car
Duesenberg is the aristocrat of American cars, a status-symbol collector's marque with a near- religious following.