Word: piaggio
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last week Genoa's Piaggio & Co., makers of Italy's first scooter, the Vespa (wasp), invaded the U.S. market with a roar. Sears, Roebuck & Co., which had ordered 1,000 Vespas as an experiment, sent a rush order for 5,000 more by September, and Piaggio prepared to supply Sears with up to 2,000 a month thereafter. Price...
Menace to Reds. The family-owned Piaggio Co., run by Enrico Piaggio, 47, was Italy's biggest wartime producer of aircraft engines. At war's end, with most of its main plant destroyed and a ban on plane-making, Piaggio started building scooters patterned after the collapsible motor scooters used by U.S. and German paratroopers. Only 65 in. long and weighing 185 lbs., the Vespa had a 4½ horsepower engine in the rear one-tenth the size of those in standard American motorcycles. Yet it did 43 m.p.h. (a souped-up model has been timed...