The Hornecker Torpedo: Whiting’s Motorcycle

John Hmurovic
October 2020

For a brief time, Whiting was one of America’s motorcycle manufacturing centers. It was the home of the Hornecker Torpedo which, at the time, was a serious competitor of Harley-Davidson and Indian. While the Harley and Indian names live on, the Hornecker Torpedo is only familiar to those who know vintage bikes. Mike Wolfe, the star of the History Channel’s American Pickers, spends his life hunting for antiques. He says his “holy grail,” the one object he really wants to find, is a Hornecker Torpedo.

The Torpedo was born in Whiting in 1906. It was made at the Hornecker Motor Manufacturing Company, which was located on Indianapolis Boulevard, on the currently empty lot where Corman Plumbing stood for many years, just north of where White Castle is now located. The company was owned by George Hornecker.

Hornecker was born in Geneseo, Illinois, on October 3, 1873. He was the fifth of nine children born to George and Catherine (Ernst) Hornecker, both natives of Baden, Germany. He worked on his family’s farm until 1896, when he came to Whiting and got a job at the Standard Oil refinery. Part of the reason he came to Whiting might have been Clara Wille. Her father was Rev. Herman Philip Wille, the minister at Geneseo’s Lutheran Church. Rev. Wille and his wife had ten children, including Clara, who was two years younger than George Hornecker. In 1891, Rev. Wille moved his family to Whiting, where he served as pastor of the First Lutheran Church. He was Whiting’s first regular minister of any denomination. It wasn’t long after George arrived in Whiting that he married Clara.

Besides working at Standard Oil, George also worked as a clerk at a hardware store. In August 1897, six months after he married Clara, he left the refinery and started his own hardware store. It must have been successful, because he soon expanded the business and turned it into a department store called The Fair. By 1904, it was the most prosperous retail business in Whiting.

Hornecker, by the age of 30, was a Whiting success story. Besides owning a thriving retail store, he managed Whiting’s first telephone company, was a stockholder in the First National Bank, was a volunteer firefighter, and was elected to the city council. By 1905, however, he shifted gears on his career. He sold off his ownership and management of The Fair and moved into a new and exciting industry…motor vehicles.

The Hornecker Motor Manufacturing Company came into being in early 1906. George Hornecker was the president and treasurer, and Charles Blankenheim was the secretary and superintendent. They had backing from Charles Waschlesky, Fred Smith, Joseph Woodward, and George Fedorka. Hornecker built a two-story factory on Indianapolis Boulevard that was 30 feet wide and 113 feet long, with five large glass windows. They sold Rambler cars at the site and operated a garage to repair motor vehicles, but the main business was to manufacture motorcycles.

Torpedo was the name that Hornecker and Blankenheim gave to their motorcycle. What made it unique, its selling point, were a couple of inventions by Hornecker. On most motorcycles of that era, a rider had to take his hand off the handlebar to reach down to adjust the spark and throttle. Hornecker’s invention made it possible for the rider to control the spark and throttle from the handle grips. Hornecker and Blankenheim teamed up on a second invention. This one added a spring to the front fork of the bike, allowing a smoother ride. Their cushioning device, Hornecker and Blankenheim said in their patent application, “will absorb many of the shocks and vibrations,” which not only provides a smoother ride, but also protects the tire from the shocks.

To prove the value of their machine, Hornecker and Blankenheim entered the Whiting-built Torpedo into a number of races. Blankenheim was often the rider. In September 1906, he competed in the fourth annual endurance run organized by the Federation of American Motorcyclists. It was held in Muskegon, Michigan, with a crowd of 5,000 on hand. Blankenheim and the Torpedo won two of the three races in the competition.

Blankenheim followed that up in a 300-mile run for the Chicago American silver cup. He did not win, but he was among the top finishers in the field of 35, which qualified him and eleven others to compete for the Chicago Examiner Cup. Although Blankenheim and the Torpedo did not finish with the fastest time, they did accumulate the highest number of points, which won him the cup.

The Hornecker Motor Manufacturing Company, the Whiting Call newspaper said, goes “along quietly enough, doing business every day, but there has been no brass band effort to make people sit up and take particular notice.” The Examiner Cup, however, earned them some attention. The trophy was put in the window at Vater Brothers, where all of Whiting could see it. Nationally, the Torpedo also received attention when Hornecker entered it in the eighth annual auto show in Chicago. “Whiting’s motorcycle factory is coming swiftly to the front these days with orders coming in from all over the country,” the Whiting Sun newspaper reported. More workers were hired to meet the demand.

All seemed to be going well for Hornecker’s business as 1907 began, but less than two weeks into the new year his personal life started to unravel. Clara, his 31-year-old wife, took ill. She was admitted to Wesleyan Hospital in Chicago in critical condition. For months, it looked like she would not survive. In February, for instance, George had to catch a midnight train into Chicago on a Wednesday night after word reached him that she was close to death. She survived that scare, but later in the month George was injured when something fell on his foot at his factory. He tried to ignore it, but when it didn’t heal he was taken to the same hospital where his wife was still fighting for her life. Doctors feared he was going to get blood poisoning. He spent two weeks in the hospital.

The Horneckers had five children, but their second died in infancy. The other four were all under the age of ten while their mother spent eight months in the hospital. Even when she was released in August, she was confined to a wheelchair. The Hornecker home at 1538 Fred Street was not equipped to accommodate her. George had a vacant store at 119th and Sheridan converted into a recovery room for her and hired a nurse to care for her full time. She remained there for two months. For the next 31 years, the remainder of her life, Clara never regained the ability to walk.

Running a business and raising four children with limits on the assistance Clara was able to provide, George also faced increased financial strains from his wife’s medical problems. Charles Blankenheim continued to enter the Torpedo into races and continued to do well. He was, for instance, one of twenty contestants in a ten-mile contest at Chicago’s Harlem racetrack in October 1907. The Torpedo finished third, topped only by a Harley-Davidson and an Indian bike.

Despite the successes, by early 1908 Hornecker decided he needed the help of his family to care for Clara and their children. Most of his family, however, lived in his hometown of Geneseo, Illinois, more than 150 miles west of Whiting. His only choice was to shut down his Whiting factory.

He restarted his business in Geneseo. Charles Blankenheim, who was five years older than Hornecker, lived in Chicago. After the Whiting plant closed, he decided to part ways with Hornecker. He continued to work with motorbikes, and entered into a partnership with L.J. Leonard to build a motorcycle they called the Meteor. Even into his 70s, Blankenheim worked on motorbikes at a shop operated by his son. He died in 1957 at the age of 89.

Hornecker’s factory in Geneseo continued to build Torpedo motorcycles from its opening at the start of 1908 and continued to receive rave reviews. The Davenport Daily Times called it “one of the best on the market.” He continued to enter it into races and feature it at auto shows. It was sold across the country. But by the end of 1910, Hornecker’s financial situation worsened. In the first days of 1911, he filed for bankruptcy.

George moved his family to Chicago in September of 1910, as he looked for ways to dig himself out of his financial hole. He eventually settled in Coal City, Illinois, about 25 miles southwest of Joliet. He worked as a salesman for a hardware company, and later as the manager of hardware for Bent Brothers, a furniture maker. He died in 1953, just three days after his 80th birthday.

The name of George Hornecker has vanished from the common knowledge of those who know the history of the motorcycle. But for five years, 1906 through 1910, he was a motorcycle pioneer and innovator. He was also a Whiting business pioneer. He founded one of the city’s most successful department stores of the first decade of the 1900s and operated the only successful motor vehicle factory in the city’s history.