Honda CB 750: The 50th Birthday!
"Happy Birthday to you."
Fifty years ago, British bikers got their first look of the machine that would change motorcycling forever. On April 21, 1969, at the Metropole Hotel, venue for the Brighton Motorcycle show, two pre-production examples of the all-new Honda CB750 were displayed for the very first time.
As the first mass-production motorcycle with not just four cylinders but also a disc brake and electric starter, the CB750 set the new standard for sophistication. It was, in fact, the first ‘superbike’. A new word had entered our lexicon.
And as the first big-bore, multi-cylinder machine from the Far East, the CB not only ushered in a new era of Japanese dominance, with similar ‘UJMs’ (‘Universal Japanese Motorcycle’, the term soon applied to the flood of transverse fours which followed such as the Kawasaki Z1 and Suzuki GS) coming to define the ’70s and early ’80s.
Debashish S Neupane
