Thanks to their simple structure, relatively low cost, and a fairly mature industrial system, the Austrian Empire could already mass-produce motorcycles.
However, the prototype Franz saw at this time had three wheels rather than the two commonly seen in later generations.
The person in charge of motorcycle research was not Lenoir, but Josef Ressel—another genius buried by Austrian Imperial history.
Josef Ressel had originally been an art student. He took his family's savings and secretly ran off to Vienna, only to be judged as lacking emotional expression in his paintings.
Moreover, several of his paintings depicted plants, so he was promptly sent next door to the forestry academy, where he ultimately became a naval forestry officer.
A naval forestry officer's duty was to help the navy select timber suitable for shipbuilding. Ordinarily, Josef Ressel would have spent his life among the forests, just like his predecessors had for thousands of years.
Yet he was exceptionally skilled at learning and observation, and soon invented a set of precision instruments that could rapidly measure a tree's height and the hardness of its timber.
The data measured by these instruments was more accurate than that obtained by many experienced forestry officers, while requiring less than one percent of their time.
Thus, Josef Ressel successfully worked himself out of a job.
Fortunately, the Austrian Imperial Navy had a highly open-minded culture at the time, and soon arranged another job for Josef Ressel: delivering messages around the shipyard.
Because the shipyard environment was complicated, he often had to cross countless obstacles to deliver letters. Even then, people would question whether he had peeked at their contents or taken something from within.
To Josef Ressel, this was a completely meaningless job, so he began looking for a solution.
Through his study of aerodynamics, he successfully designed