If you like scooters—and let’s face it, numerous us do as a result of we could have skilled our first motorized two-wheel rides on one—Barry John’s new Culture & Customization: The Motor Scooter Story is a e-book you’ll need to give a glance.
With over 200 shade and black-and-white pictures, illustrations (drawn by the writer), the e-book gives outstanding insights into model histories, racing, design, and improvement of the motor scooter. John sheds mild on the scooter’s many kinds and little-recognized points of what has turn into one of many world’s hottest automobiles.
John reveals the very earliest beginnings of motorized scooters in America in 1915 with early stand-on scooters such because the Autoped. From there, he traces the evolution and improvement of the step-by, single and double-seat fashions from around the globe, and identifies the watershed submit-WWII interval when scooter gross sales took off.
Economical, dependable transportation has at all times been in demand, but it surely was important in submit-conflict Europe and Asia. In that atmosphere, the motor scooter actually got here into its personal, impressed by machines such because the British Excelsior Welbike and the American-made Cushman Model 32 that the army delivered to Italy throughout WWII.
John describes how a lot of the submit-conflict improvement of the scooter as a significant component in private transportation occurred in Italy as Piaggio’s Vespa and Innocenti’s Lambretta battled for home and export market dominance. Similarly, in Japan, with the Nakajima Aircraft Company not allowed to supply army plane after the conflict, the corporate was re-invented because the Fuji Sangyo Company. The consequence was the Fuji Rabbit S1 in 1946. Mitsubishi joined the fray in Japan with the Silver Pidgeon scooter, and Honda got here out with its Juno scooter in 1954.
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Culture & Customization: The Motor Scooter Story tracks the commercial and cultural evolution of the Scooter by the Nineteen Fifties and ’60s, offering an important overview of the various producers that joined the scooter market as demand continued to develop worldwide. One factor that is perhaps thought of for a future version of this complete quantity is Harley-Davidson’s entry into the scooter market—the Topper. It was within the product line from 1960 to 1965, although solely 7,445 had been constructed.
John recounts some outstanding achievements with inventory and radically modified scooters in land pace racing and drag racing (known as sprinting within the U.Okay.), in addition to in globe-trotting journey driving proper as much as latest years. He additionally explains the “mods” social phenomena spawned in Sixties Britain, which mixed scooter customization with an appreciation of British R&B bands equivalent to The Who and The Small Faces.
![Jimmy’s Quadrophenia Scooter Replica to Bonhams](https://2yrh403fk8vd1hz9ro2n46dd-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/2014-jimmy-scooter-on-block-2.jpg)
The subsequent evolution in scooter energy is roofed, as nicely, with John going into some depth on electrical scooters and the potential improvement of scooters powered by hydrogen gasoline cells. He explains their workings, in addition to potential limitations and disadvantages for gasoline cell know-how, a minimum of for the foreseeable future.
Culture & Customization: The Motor Scooter Story is superbly produced. John’s writing model is obvious and concise, with an important mixture of conversational model narrative and interesting technical element.
- Title: Culture & Customization: The Motor Scooter Story
- Author: Barry John
- Published: October 2021 by Evro Publishing, Westrow House, Holwell, Sherborne, Dorset DT9 5LF, U.Okay.
- Hardcover, 112 8.25” x 8.0” pages, 200 shade and black & white (interval) pictures and illustrations
- ISBN: 978-1-910505-74-8
- Price: $30 MSRP