Personalised protection

FOR MOST OF their history, motorcycle helmets have been as much about self expression as head protection. Which is good – because the earliest helmets didn’t provide much of the latter.

Back when football players wore soft leather helmets, motorcycles were just starting to dot the American countryside and city streets. Speeds were low, and ‘heavy traffic’ sometimes meant two vehicles within sight of each other.

Accordingly, the first ‘helmets’ were made of thin leather or cloth, and primarily succeeded in keeping the wearer’s hair in place. As it does so often, racing led the way in head protection technology and popularity, and by the 1950s and ’60s, helmets were worn by all kinds of motorcycle riders.

In the first years that Harley-Davidson® offered a hard-shell helmet, starting with 1958, two of three total choices were aimed specifically at police officers and racers. For the next 13 years, self-expression took a back seat to safety: you could buy your H-D® helmet in any colour you liked, so long as it was white. By 1971, multiple colours were offered, but the styles remained limited (unlike today, where a variety of styles and colours is available).

Leave it to Harley® riders to come up with their own ways to express themselves through creative headwear. Some of their creations – such as the helmets pictured here – are now preserved for posterity in the Harley-Davidson Museum™.

To see more historical items from the H-D Archives, visit the Harley-Davidson Museum™ in Milwaukee. www.h-dmuseum.com.

1) Replica of the helmet worn by Peter Fonda’s ‘Wyatt’ character in Easy Rider. Matches the motorcycle’s red, white and blue paint.
2) Felix Predko, builder of the Harley-Davidson Museum’s ‘King Kong’ motorcycle, came up with a variety of custom helmet designs. One is a modified batting helmet with front and rear visors and hand-worked metal trim; another features rear brake and directional lighting.
3) Replica of Evel Knievel’s signature helmet.
4) Early H-D racing team member Maldwyn Jones, about 1915. Helmet appears to be crudely stitched leather.
5) Racer Bo Lisman had a signature helmet with chequered flag motif. (It’s possible that having an utterly unique helmet made the racer easier to spot by team members, crew and racing officials.)
6) Page from the 1920 Accessory Catalogue showing very early headwear.
7) Cover of the 1958 Accessory Catalogue, the first year Harley-Davidson sold hard-shell helmets to the general public.

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