Does anyone know what the first bike was to have what we now know as the standard controls - Right Foot (brakes), Left Foot (gears), etc.?

 

First bike or first sportster? Sportster I think was 75

 

First bike.

 

Had to have been a Honda, my guess.

My first ('53 Matchless), a 500 Brit thumper acquired in 1965, had the old foot controls and it took some getting used to when I bought a rice burner around 1968.

Seems like it wasn't long before everyone used that configuration - a couple of years later my BSA Victor (another thumper) had the new layout. I rode a new Sportster around that time and I THOUGHT that it also had the new layout ...

 

Pretty sure it was a honda from what i can remember. something like a '58 super cub?

 

There is no easy answer to that, as in earlier times every combination you can imagine existed. I believe Velocette invented the foot change as we know it, probably in the 1930s. During the early 70s I had several bikes, including a left-footer, plus right-footers with up-for-up and down-for-up sequences, all of them bought new or near new. Certainly many European brands used left-foot changers and at least one Japanese brand (Bridgestone?) came with ambidextrous (I know - that means hands, but stay with it!) foot controls, so the owner could swap them over.

Left foot change was around long before any of the Japanese brands started exporting to the West. Many early Japanese manufacturers, post WW2, used European engine units and other major parts, so would have both combinations. While British bikes were mostly right foot, they differed between brands from up-for-up and down-for-up.

The USA standardised foot controls during the 1970s as best I recall, to the way they are today. That would fit with Rog48s suggestion. Bear in mind that previously Harley made their big twins with left foot change and their Sportsters with right foot! The earlier Harley Hummer strokers were left foot, but only because they were based on the German DKW, which BSA also copied in the UK, but reversed the design so we could have right foot ones.

 

Harley's big twins were also available with optional foot clutch/hand shift until 1979.