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History of Piaggio and Vespa
Motor scooters
(Based on How to Restore and
Maintain Your Vespa Motor scooter
Book, by Bob Darnell & Bob
Golfen)
The Vespa motor scooter is
emblematic of all that is
romantic and carefree about the
Continental lifestyle, a virtual
symbol of Italy, and a stylistic
icon readily connected with
youth and adventure. For many
parts of the world, Vespa
scooter are also a workhorse of
basic transportation, a
ubiquitous urban presence in
European and Asian nation – the
buzzing of motor scooter is
still heard throughout ancient
alleys and wide boulevard. With
more than 15 million sold in a
half-century of production,
Vespa models are far and away
the best-selling motor scooter
of all time.
For Italians, the Vespa scooter
has a broader meaning, symbolic
of their country’s reemergence
as a major industrial power from
the shambles of World War II. It
shows how a complex economic
problem can be reduced to the
elegant simplicity of a motor
scooter. And Vespa designs serve
to demonstrate the Italian sense
of style and innovation.
From its roots of providing
basic transportation and the
bare beginnings of economic
survival for the people of Italy
devastated by World War II, to
its role as treed-setting
fashion accessory during the
turbulent 1960s, the Vespa motor
scooter has retained its general
design and overall mission. The
style and culture fit in well
with today’s youth, who
appreciate the retro charm and
post-industrial. Old scooters
fauns parked in garages and
basements are being resurrected,
restored, and ridden by a new
generation.
Piaggio, the company that
developed and produces the Vespa
scooter, goes back more that a
century, founded in Genoa by
Rinaldo Piaggio in 1884 as
Societa Anonima Piaggio.
Originally dedicated to
producing woodworking machinery,
the company was soon engaged in
building railroad cars for the
booming rail industry. Latter,
the company built commercial
vehicles, automobiles, and
boats. During World War I,
Piaggio began to take part in
the fledgling aviation industry
by making airplane parts in
1914, and the following year,
entire airplane. Piaggio’s
innovative bent soon emerged as
he developed such advances as as
pressurized cabins and
retractable landing gear. An
aviation engine designed by
Piaggio set 20 word records
during the 1920s.
In 1938, Rinaldo Piaggio died,
leaving the company’s two
factories in Tuscany to Enrico
Piaggio, 33, and his younger
brother, Armando, 31. The timing
for two young industrialist to
take over their father’s
business couldn’t have been
worse, as fascist dictator
Benito Mussolini had cemented
his power in Italy and was
poised to enter a pact for world
conquest with Germany’s Nazi
leader, Adolph Hitler.
During the war, the factories
cranked out aircraft for the
Axis war effort, developing
several fighters and Italy’s
only heavy bomber. Naturally,
the factories became prime
targets for Allied bombing
raids. They were hit again and
again, and at war’s end, the
factory lay in ruins, and more
than 10,000 Piaggio employees
were out of work. But then, much
of Italy was a shambles, all its
industries bombed and destroyed,
its people poverty stricken and
demoralized. Under terms of the
Allied peace agreement, Piaggio
was banned from producing
aircraft, which left Enrico
Piaggio, who by then had taken
over the business, casting about
for a new product once he had
rebuilt a factory in which to
produce it.
NECESSITY, THE MOTHER OF VESPA
Transportation was a struggle in
post-war Italy. Automobiles were
expensive and in extremely short
supply, even if people could
find enough gasoline to run
them. Most of Italy’s workforce
depended on a scant number of
bicycles to fulfill modest
transportation needs. Piaggio,
with his background in
transportation, saw the need of
the people and a way to get his
factories humming again with a
product that would be relatively
easy to produce and allowed
under terms of the peace
agreement. And as it turned out,
it was a product that would
boost the morale of a defeated
nation. Soon, he was devising a
new kind of basic vehicle so
innovative that it would forge
his mark on the second half of
the twentieth century.
Piaggio didn’t invent the motor
scooter. It had been tried
before, but without much real
success. The earlier scooter
were mired in bicycle and
motorcycle technology, failing
to move beyond the tried and
true, and turned out to be
heavy, clumsy, and slow.
Piaggio’s vision of a scooter
was absolutely unique, more like
a two-wheeled auto-mobile than a
bicycle—a clean, comfortable
vehicle that a could be driven
by anyone with ease.
Piaggio had observed a failed
effort by the Italian army to
provide small scooters for
paratroopers. Called the
Aeromoto, it was produced by the
Turin company, Societa
Volugrafo, and design to be
parachuted out of airplanes
along with the soldiers, who
would use them to buzz their way
over to the battle front more
quickly. Perhaps a good idea,
but the Aeromoto was so poorly
designed, underpowered, and
unstable that the plan was
quickly abandoned, along with
the scooters.
In 1945, two of piaggio’s design
engineers, Vittorio Casini and
Renzo Spolti, produced a scooter
based on a small motorcycle
being built at his Biella plant.
They had taken an earlier
scooter design, the peculiar
SIMAT designed by Vittorio
Belmondo in the late 1930s, and
built on the basic idea. What
they produced was an ungainly
contraption, nicknamed Paparino,
the Italian derivative of Donald
Duck, which mockingly reflected
its odd, ducklike shape. Piaggio
himself described it as “a
horrible-looking thing,” and it
was soundly ridiculed by the
press and public.
But from those humble efforts,
Piaggio saw the spark of genius.
Paparino had fired his emplotees
back to work and Italy back on
wheels. Piaggio wanted to build
a new kind of scooter that would
be inexpensive, economical,
light-weigh and maneuverable,
and able to be ridden
comfortably by women as well as
men. He wanted the rider of his
scooter to be shielded from
dirt, pudled, and the bike’s
mechanical parts, the same as a
person driving a car. And he
wanted it to be the soul of
simplicity, easy to build, easy
to understand, and easy to
repair.
To help realize his vision,
Piaggio in 1945 enlisted the
help of his head designer,
engineer Corradino D’Ascanio,
the inventor of the helicopter,
who took his vast knowledge of
automobile and aircraft design
and narrowed its complexities
down to the most basic of terms.
D’Ascanio disliked traditional
motorcycles and felt that they
had more defects than
attributes—uncomfortable seating
position, exposure to puddles
and road debris, dangerous drive
chain, and difficulty in
repairing flat tires, among
other faults. So he set out to
create something that would take
Paparino a giant step further
along, and well away from
motorcycle technology. A major
part of D’Ascanio’s innovative
work came from his understanding
of stressed-skin body-work, used
extensively in aircraft, in
which the body serves double
duty as an outside frame,
eliminating any sort of separate
supporting structure. Today, we
know this as monocoque, or
unibody, design, with
essentially every passenger
vehicle based on the concept.
But in 1945, it was radical
thinking.
In just three months, D’Ascanio
delivered his assignment. When
the engineer returned with his
take on scooter design, Piaggio
was impressed with the result.
D’Ascanio’s scooter was smooth
and aerodynamic, with an overall
shape that looked strikingly
modern. As Piaggio looked at the
scooter's narrow waist and wide,
rounded rear aspect, and heard
the buzzing of the little 98-cc
engine, he remarked, “Semba una
vespa,” which in Italian meant,
“It seems like a wasp.” Of
course, “Vespa” is the name that
stuck, and remains still, all
around the globe.
It became the prototype Vespa
motor scooter. It was
constructed without a supporting
frame, instead using a
sheet-metal fuselage. It has a
broad shield to deflect splashes
and debris from the rider, who
sat upright gripping wide
handlebars. The front fork was
substituted with a one-sided
wheel assembly and suspension
much like the tail-dragger wheel
of an airplane. A drive chain or
drive shaft was unnecessary
because the unitized engine and
drive train were hidden within
the bodywork of the scooter,
shielding the rider from grease,
dirt, and oil. D’Ascanio had
taken elements of motorcycles,
bicycles, automobiles, and
aircraft to create something new
altogether.
One obvious advantage over the
motorcycle was the ease of
repairing a flat tire. When
motorcycle riders suffer a flat,
they are stuck with the daunting
job of dismantling the tire and
tube from the wheel—which is
difficult to remove from the
bike—patching the tube and
putting it all back together.
It’s a dirty job that requires
tools and skill. But with the
Vespa design, both the front and
rear wheels are identical,
mounted on one-sided stub axles
that allow them to be removed
easily and replaced with a
spare, which is carried on the
back of the scooter or, in later
years, behind the legshield or
under the left cowl.
PLEASE VISIT SHOWROOM VESPA & SCOOTER
www.vespaitalia.info
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