The recent Hoka Hey Motorcycle Challenge got me thinking about the riders who did the impossible with little more than a bike, a map, and nerve. One name rose to the top: Robert Edison Fulton Jr. I’ve stared at that legendary black-and-white photo of him on the loaded Douglas for years. With Dallas stuck near 107 degrees - and neither my bike nor I willing to sit in it - I finally did a deep dive on how that historic ride came together.
Before GPS, satellite messengers, and adventure-bike luggage systems, a 23-year-old American architecture graduate told a London dinner party he was going home the long way: around the world, on a motorcycle. One guest happened to own Douglas Motorcycles. A few weeks later, Robert Edison Fulton Jr. rolled out of England on a specially prepared Bristol flat-twin with extra fuel, car tires, a movie camera, and a revolver hidden under a skid plate.
This is not the steamboat inventor. This is the other Robert Fulton - named after both that inventor and Thomas Edison - and one of the most important adventure-riding stories most modern dual-sport riders have never fully heard.
The boast became an 18-month, roughly 40,000-mile solo ride from London through Europe, the Middle East, India, Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, China, and Japan, then across the United States. That dinner-party dare, and the factory-built Douglas that carried it out, is the story below.
The Boast That Became a Route
Fulton had just finished architectural studies in Vienna after Harvard. Home was New York. The polite question at dinner was when he would sail. His answer, which he later admitted startled even him, was that he would ride around the world instead.
A Douglas executive at the table - accounts name Kenton Redgrave after the firm’s 1931–32 ownership shakeup - took him at his word. Within weeks Fulton was at the Kingswood, Bristol works collecting a rare 750cc H32 Mastiff, a sidevalve flat twin built as a heavyweight tourer and sidecar tug. Period figures put it around 744cc (76 x 82 mm), with modest power by modern standards and a claimed top speed in the 70s when unladen. Loaded for a world tour, it was never about speed. It was about going the distance.
The factory added the kit a 1932 overland rider actually needed:
Main tank plus a four-gallon auxiliary tank (about seven gallons total)
Common automobile tires so replacements could be found almost anywhere
Windshield with a map pocket
Tool boxes on both sides
A steel case for spare parts and thousands of feet of 35mm motion-picture film
Front rack for camera, extra shirt, toothbrush, and a canvas bag with a blanket
Steel skid plate that doubled as a gun cache
British and American flags
English plate GY 1616
That labeled publicity photo is still the most famous image of the trip: a young rider in a fur-collared coat and sun helmet, looking more like a film extra than a man about to cross deserts that maps still marked “unsurveyed.”
He left in mid-1932. Eighteen months later he reached Japan, shipped to San Francisco, and rode east to New York, arriving Christmas Eve 1933.
Why It Was a Douglas
Douglas was not a random gift. By 1932 the Bristol name already had a reputation for horizontally opposed twins that ran smoother and lower than most British singles.
The company started as a foundry. Brothers William and Edwin Douglas opened an engineering shop in Bristol in 1882, then supplied castings to Joseph Barter’s Light Motors “Fairy” flat-twin. When Light Motors folded in 1907, Douglas took over the design and put its own motorcycle on the market that same year. The layout stuck: a boxer-style twin mounted in line with the frame, a formula the firm kept, in one form or another, until the end.
A NYT’s interview: At Home With Robert Edison Fulton Jr.: Oh, the Places He's Been
That engine earned the brand more than showroom praise. Douglas twins served as World War I dispatch mounts by the tens of thousands. They won Isle of Man TT classes, including the 1912 Junior, and later sidecar TTs. In the late 1920s the same low, even-firing twins became dirt-track and speedway weapons in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. Riders called them Duggies. Mechanics liked that the opposed cylinders stayed cooler and the bike stayed planted.
Then the Depression hit. The family firm went public, changed hands, and in 1932 launched a dog-named range to look fresh: Terrier, Bulldog, Greyhound, Airedale—and the 750cc touring H32 Mastiff Fulton received. It was a rare, short-lived model. Factory finances were so tight that 1933 Mastiff production virtually stopped, with leftover bikes sold as H33s. Giving a well-connected young American a fully kitted world-tour machine was marketing as much as generosity. Wikipedia still notes that Fulton’s ride “gained significant attention” for Douglas at a moment the company badly needed it.
Douglas staggered on. William Douglas bought back into the business. The 1934 Endeavour tried shaft drive and a transverse twin. After the war the firm shrank to 350cc flat twins, then made a last stand with the 1955–57 Dragonfly before Westinghouse took over and motorcycle production ended in 1957. The company later imported Vespas. The Fulton Mastiff remains one of the most famous single Douglas motorcycles ever built—not because thousands were sold, but because one of them went around the world.
What “Around the World” Looked Like in 1932
Fulton rode east through France, Germany, Austria, the Balkans, Greece, and Turkey, then into Syria and Iraq. A ship took him to India. He pushed into Afghanistan and what is now Pakistan, including the Khyber Pass, then on through Southeast Asia, China, and Japan. Country counts vary by source—22 to 32—because borders and stopovers were messier then. Mileage estimates run from about 25,000 miles for London-to-Tokyo to roughly 40,000 miles including the United States.
The bike started with a sidecar and far too much kit: books, cooking gear, extra shoes, even a tuxedo “in case of an embassy dinner.” Reality edited the packing list. The sidecar and tuxedo went. The cameras stayed.
He filmed with a Bell & Howell 35mm camera and shot stills with a Leica. The footage later became lecture material, then family-produced films including Twice Upon a Caravan. The written account, One Man Caravan (1937), is still the book adventure riders recommend when they want the pre-GS origin story.
It was not a sanitized travelogue. He spent a night in a Turkish jail, was hospitalized with jaundice in Baghdad, dumped the bike into a culvert in the dark, ran out of gas once, and recorded about six flats. In Waziristan a transmission kingpin sheared; the factory spare-parts bag had the piece. He was shot at near the Khyber Pass and steered around bandits in Iraq. The pistol, he later said, was most useful as a hammer.
People also helped him. Rajahs hosted him. Villagers gathered around the Douglas as if it were a spaceship. In an era with almost no tourist infrastructure, hospitality was the real navigation app.
Why This Ride Still Matters
Modern adventure riding is GPS tracks, crash bars, tubeless tires, and a phone full of embassy numbers. Fulton’s ride is the opposite case study: a dinner-party dare, a factory-modified British twin from a company fighting to stay alive, paper maps, nitrate film, and the willingness to throw away the tuxedo when the road got real.
A few takeaways that still hold:
Range beats romance. The extra tank and car-sized tires were smarter than the formal wear.
The right engine layout helps. Douglas built its name on a smooth, low flat-twin—the same idea BMW later made famous.
Film the ride. His movie camera turned a stunt into a career. A Harvard Club screening led to work documenting Pan American Clipper routes.
Travel light after the first thousand miles. Every long-distance rider still learns this the hard way.
The machine is only half the story. One Man Caravan endures because Fulton wrote about people, not just punctures.
After the trip he kept inventing—flight and gunnery trainers, the Airphibian flying car, the Skyhook aerial retrieval system—and collected around 70 patents. By then the Douglas had been restored and kept in the family. The boast had become a life.
Fulton had two marriages and three children; he died at his home in Newtown, Connecticut on May 7, 2004, at the ripe age of 95.
Read It, Watch It, Then Look at Your Own Bike
If you ride adventure or vintage iron, put One Man Caravan on the nightstand. Look up Twice Upon a Caravan for Fulton’s later narration over the original footage. Then look at that 1932 labeled photo again: sun helmet, map-pocket windshield, four-gallon tank, film case, skid plate—bolted to a Bristol twin from a factory that would be gone in 25 years.
No heated grips. No crash sensors. No “share my live location.”
Just a young rider, a Douglas Mastiff, and a sentence he could not take back.
That is still the purest version of why we throw a leg over a motorcycle.
~Keep the shiny side up!