History
AJS had been bought by Matchless's owners, the Colliers, in 1931 and Sunbeam was added in 1937 from Imperial Chemical Industries. The name of the Matchless Motor Cycles company was changed to "Amalgamated Motor Cycles Ltd" in 1937 and "Associated Motor Cycles (AMC)" in 1938. AMC was not a manufacturer in its own right, but rather the parent company of a group of motorcycle manufacturers which included Matchless, AJS, Norton, James, Francis-Barnett, Sunbeam and others.
In 1939 a 495 cc AJS V4 was built to compete against the supercharged BMWs then dominating racing. The bike was a water-cooled and supercharged. In 1939 the dry-sump V4 was the first bike to lap the Ulster Grand Prix course at over 100 mph (161 km/h). It weighed 405 lb (184 kg). Its top speed was 135 mph (217 km/h). Then the Second World War intervened. During the War, Matchless manufactured 80,000 G3 and G3L models for the armed forces. AMC sold the Sunbeam name to BSA in 1943.
Read more about this topic: Associated Motor Cycles
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)