Triumph Number One

TRIUMPH NUMBER ONE

WHEN SIEGFRIED BETTMANN CHOSE THE name Triumph for his 1886 line of bicycles, he did so for the most pragmatic of reasons: “Triumph” had the same meaning, and almost the same pronunciation, in the various European countries in which he hoped to market his product.

Bettmann may have been a pioneer, but he was no prophet. He was merely a hard-headed Nürnberg, Germany, businessman transplanted to Britain’s fertile economic soil who could not have known how prescient his name choice would turn out to be.

Bettmann’s first Triumph motorcycle, introduced in 1902, did not bow to the world press that has been so eager to greet the reborn Triumph line of the 1990s. Triumph Number One was by all accounts a fairly ordinary device based on one of Bettmann’s bicycles, built in the Coventry plant he constructed in 1888. It was powered by a Belgian-built, 239cc, single-cylinder Minerva engine that used a standard exhaust valve and an intake valve pulled open by the suction of the 2.25horsepower engine’s intake stroke. The engine was clipped onto the bottom of the bike’s front down tube and drove the rear wheel via a pulley-and-belt arrangement. The motorbicycle, as such devices were called at the turn of the century, retained its standard pedals, and as was often the case with such equipment, “light pedal assistance,” abbreviated as LPA, was required when the rider encountered a hill.

This machine was produced until 1905, when Triumph introduced a 3-horsepower machine powered by a Triumph-built engine. Before too many more years had passed, Bettmann and his manufacturing compatriots found themselves in a raging motorcycle boom that not only fueled development of the motorcycle into the sophisticated, fast and reliable machines that swarmed pre-war Europe’s roads and racetracks, but led to the famed 1937 Triumph Speed Twin. That was the forerunner of the Bonneville 650, perhaps the best-loved Triumph of all time, and the Triumph that left in its wake such a residual of good will that it was possible for the nameplate’s most recent owner, developer John Bloor, to launch to an eager public an all-new line of Triumph motorcycles for the 1990s.

So you see, old Bettmann’s enterprise produced much more of a triumph than he ever could have imagined.

Jon F. Thompson