Word: scooter
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Postman Smith made his escape in a four-wheeled scooter powered by a small gasoline engine. He stands at the back of his doodlebug, put-putting along at four to twelve miles an hour. For a delivery, he leaves his scooter contentedly burbling at the curb, manages to save not only foot-power but some 23% of the time formerly needed to cover his route. His superior, Superintendent of Mails B. H. Kaigler, intends to recommend the scooter's adoption for mailmen in residential districts everywhere...
Having built one scooter, Postman Smith is the smallest operator in a new automotive industry that has grown mightily within the past three years and is now engaged in trying to work itself out of the recreation-vehicle class. Visualized by scooter-makers is a flourishing trade in which one-lung puddle-jumpers will be used for messenger service, light deliveries, transportation of commuters from home to railroad station and back...
Unlike Postman Smith's contraption, the commercial scooter is a two-or three-wheeled affair. It can go up to 35 miles an hour, runs 120 miles on a gallon of gas. Underslung between small, pneumatic-tired wheels, it has handlebars like a motorcycle, a footboard on which the driver puts his feet, an enclosed engine housing over the rear wheel on which he sits. Unlike either bicycle or motorcycle, it can be ridden sitting straight up, with a minimum loss of dignity. The rider straddles no crossbar, has no engine between his knees to oil his slacks...
...output was 2,700. This year, looking back on retail sales of more than $500,000 for 1938, Siegal has 75 men at work in a new factory on Chicago's South Side, likes to hear his employes call him the Henry Ford of the scooter business...
...Conn, home. Last week publishers Doubleday, Doran & Co., launching Author McFee's Derelicts, called attention to one of his neatest puttering jobs, a 30-in. scale model of a lifeboat propelled not by oars, but by a propeller turned by hand levers like those on an Irish Mail scooter...