First Porsche-built e-bike was in ... 1893!?!

1894 April, Ferdinand at the age of 18 - Porsche photo

Professor Ferdinand Porsche is well known for the quote, "I couldn't find the sports car of my dreams, so I built it myself." But apparently before Porsche was building the sports car of his dreams, he built one of the very first electric bicycles.

Researching Porsche bicycles, I found a website for a museum in Mattsee, Austria (just outside Salzburg) that honors Ferdinand Porsche. The museum shares Porsche's engineering history and interestingly rents e-bikes for rides around town. Why e-bikes? Well, when Ferdinand was 18 years old he built an e-bike to get from work to school, the website explained.

Here is an excerpt:

"He invented the first e-bike out of necessity. In 1893, he started his first job as a mechanic at the Bela Egger United Electricity Company in Vienna. After work, he ran to the Technical University and listened to the lectures on electricity as a “sneak listener” – he was not officially enrolled at the university. He had to walk the distance between home, workplace and university. For the restless and ambitious young Porsche, this seemed to cost too much precious working time, which literally fell by the wayside. Then he discovered an old bicycle in the corner of the stairwell of his apartment. He bought the battered vehicle from its owner, repaired it, lubricated it and repainted it. To make it even faster and easier to overcome the not inconsiderable gradients in Vienna, it occurred to him to build ​​an electric motor. Thought, done! He found an octagonal piece in the company, leftover from a test assembly, and built it onto the now shiny black bike. Ferdinand Porsche’s electric bicycle, which he called “Octagon” because of the octagonal rear wheel motor, quickly became a key topic of conversation throughout the company."

The museum website also claims Porsche was the "inventor of the first e-bike." In 1893, that would be very early in the development of e-bikes. A quick wikipedia search shows one of the first e-bike patents awarded was in the United States in December 1895, two years after the museum's claim of 1893. Did Porsche invent the e-bike? It is very possible. He is also recognized for building the first hybrid automobile in 1898, so maybe add the first electric bicycle to the list!

What I find most interesting is that the first vehicle Professor Ferdinand Porsche ever created was a two-wheel electric bicycle – not a sports car for what his name is famous for today.