Inventor Of The Scooter

– Sep 01, 2023-

Scooter is a kind of vehicle between motorcycles and automobiles, and it is a kind of popular transportation. The inventor is senior engineer Corradino D’Ascanio. Sometimes people also transliterate it as scooter.

Scooter is called “Wen Che” in Taiwan. Correspondingly, “Wu Che” refers to cruising vehicles, off-road vehicles, sports cars, etc., while Hong Kong and other Cantonese areas are used to call them sheep. Scooters are divided into many types according to their forms and uses: such as children’s scooters, handicapped vehicles, gasoline scooters, folding scooters, golf carts, mini scooters, three-wheel scooters, and so on.

Tracing back to the cultural origins of scooters, we must start from 1938, when the World War brought catastrophic damage to Piaggio. Rinaldo Piaggio also died in the same year. His two sons inherited the company. Piaggio was almost in ruins at the time, and the two brothers who succeeded the company played different roles in the company. Armando is in charge of Fenal’s factory, focusing on aircraft and railway equipment. Enrico is in charge of the factories in Pisa and Pontedera. Facing the devastated Italy, he has another ambition: to produce a simple, reliable, economical and durable means of transportation to help ordinary Italians achieve motorization. Tools have huge market potential. Enric himself is not a motorcyclist, but the car he wants to invent is a kind of vehicle between a motorcycle and a car, that is, a scooter.

In order to fulfill his great ambition, he collaborated with the talented aviation designer Corradino D’Ascanio to design a design that must be easy to drive and not splash the rider when passing through puddles. A new type of scooter with features such as light weight, easy handling, and easy riding must not be soiled, there is room for a spare tire. Coratino Ascanio has developed a simple and effective method, using an iron shell as the frame, which can not only install the engine, but also meet the above requirements. The single-arm front suspension is similar to the landing gear of an aircraft, making it easy to disassemble the front wheel. The engine is directly connected to the driving wheel. This is a change from the traditional motorcycle pedal control method. The speed control is installed on the right handlebar. In less than five months, Piaggio had turned the scooter equipped with a two-stroke engine from a drawing into a real object. In April 1946, the first prototype scooter rolled off the assembly line and was directly introduced to the market. It was named Vespa (Italian: Wasp) because of the buzzing of its engine and its tail resembling a wasp.

Enrico Piaggio, who was at the peak of his career, suddenly passed away in 1965. His successor was his son-in-law Umberto Agnelli, but the development of new products did not stop with the death of Enrico Piaggio. After successive acquisitions of the old European motorcycle company Gilera, the Derbi motorcycle company in Barcelona, Spain, the Aprilia motorcycle company, one of the three largest motorcycles in Italy, and Moto Guzzi ) After waiting for world-renowned motorcycle brands. Piaggio’s R&D level is hard to match in the world, and technological progress has also promoted the update of styles, the introduction of Quartz, Zip, fly, Skipper, Hexagon, mp3 and other models. It caused considerable waves in the market. Piaggio is not only a locomotive, but more importantly, a culture and elegance. A wave swept the world. No one can match the reputation of the father of scooters in the world.