The first patents for scooters go back as far as 1921. The Razor scooter was later developed by Gino Tsai in Shanghai, Taiwan and became an instant hit with the public. It didn’t take long for motor scooter popularity to expand all over the globe.
Even before 1950 there were as many as 110,000 scooters on the road in Italy alone. It has been just a little over 50 years since the Vespa-Douglas Corporation in the UK sold their first gas scooters. The Douglas corporation was on the verge of bankruptcy when they first began selling their gas scooters. It was a big hit at the 1950 Motorcycle Show and saved the company from possible financial ruin.
From 1950 to 1958 Vespa sold over 125,000 of their gas powered scooters in the UK. Why the great success? During this period the European countries didn’t have a great deal of money and there was not much gas available to the public. Due to the scarcity of gasoline and the high gas mileage of the gas motor scooter it’s popularity quickly escalated.
It didn’t take long for the Italian models (the Piaggio from Vespa and the Lambretta from Innocenti) to branch out to other countries. In France they...