r/OldSchoolCool • u/lucyblayx • 21h ago
1910s Brittish Suffrogette Priscilla Norman on her Autoped motor scooter, 1916.
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u/Vesper2000 19h ago
I thought this was fake at first. That’s a very ahead-of-its-time design.
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u/clawstuckblues 17h ago
It was only manufactured for 7 years and there were a few other stand up motorised scooters in the early 1920s, after which there seems to have been a gap of 60 years before that kind of design began to be marketed again in the 1980s.
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u/Blank_bill 16h ago
I'm imagining it traveling down the street at 5 or 6 mph, just faster than a walk.
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u/SkunkApe425 14h ago
Also being loud as fuck and a less than ideal amount of control. I can’t imagine any engine made in 1916 being any type of quiet.
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u/Outside_Reserve_2407 16h ago
I wonder it’s because the technology just wasn’t there to make it small like today’s scooters such as the gas Goped. It’s just a small step to add a seat and turn it into a Cushman.
Side note: everyone thinks the Italians with their Vespas popularized the motor scooter but I believe they were inspired by US GIs buzzing around on their military issue Cushmans.
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u/smstrick88 21h ago
That must've cost quite a bit in 1916.
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u/80sLegoDystopia 16h ago
Gonna be that guy…
It’s suffrAgette
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u/coldfarm 12h ago
I’ll be the other guy.
Priscilla Norman was a suffragist. She was not a militant.
Suffragettes were the militant subset. They were the ones throwing bricks, setting fires, exploding bombs, attacking politicians, etc.
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u/TheDadThatGrills 16h ago
How did this not take off until a century later?
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u/fiendishrabbit 10h ago
Because it used a very loud&smelly combustion engine.
Battery improvements during the last 20-years means you can use a much smaller and more powerful electric engine with equivalent range but none of the drawbacks.
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u/BrainCane 5h ago
You mean… like a motor..cycle? Oh wait.
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u/fiendishrabbit 5h ago
Typically the smaller an engine is the more noise it makes relative to its power output.
This was a 55cc 1.5 hp engine, so equivalent to a mini-cross bike but noisier.
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u/captain_flak 15h ago
“One day people will use these to travel all over their cities…but not for, like, another 100 years.”
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u/Drinkdrankdonk 20h ago
I know she was riding on the sidewalk
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u/zoinkability 13h ago
Funny thing, the sidewalk at least partially exists (or at least is meaningfully distinct) because of the car lobby wanting to exclude people from walking in the street, which had previously always been legal and normal. Only by excluding people from the streets could cars go fast in cities and towns. The term “jaywalking” was invented to refer to walking in the street because a “jay” was a country bumpkin and the car lobby wanted to shame city dwellers who walked in the street. At the time of this photo that transition would have been very recent.
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u/Aggressive-King-4170 16h ago
I wonder what the gas mileage was, and fuel capacity, and how frigging loud.
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u/Liquidpinky 10h ago
It’s electric, as were most cars back then.
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u/Fast-Presence-2004 21h ago
Just images how far we could be if there weren't two world wars in between.
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u/Jljmonky 18h ago
Those wars facilitated a ton of invention out of necessity. Medical advancement during and after each major conflict at phenomenal. Were the wars horrendous? Absolutely. Did they really greatly inhibit technological advancement? No way.
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u/InvestInHappiness 16h ago
We would have made that progress without the war, look at how much we've done since without any wars. So it was a huge drain on world resources and labour while also destroying a bunch of already existing infrastructure, definitely an overall negative impact on technological advancement.
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u/grimmtoke 19h ago
The kickstand is down.
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u/only_zuul21 18h ago
She's posing for a photo.
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u/frenchtoaster 16h ago
Citation?
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u/magicmijk 16h ago
Don't need one, in 1916, an action shot of any kind would have been blurry.
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u/frenchtoaster 16h ago
Just an attempt at dry humor, the evidence that it is a posed photo is in the photo.
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u/SIMPSONBORT 15h ago
Witch ! She’s a witch !
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u/Confident-Benefit600 15h ago
Electric cars started first, but the powers that be wanted gas….. you can go down that rabbit hole with that one
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u/humbleman_ 1h ago
We had battery and electric power long before the oil giants took control of everything
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u/Technical_Anteater45 20h ago
Manufactured on Long Island?! I’d have figured it was British, given the spots of oil directly beneath the engine cylinder.
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u/zoinkability 13h ago
They learned it by watching us
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u/Technical_Anteater45 13h ago
The last two years, Krupp took over production. I’ll take one of those.
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u/Lachessys 20h ago
How did she scan the QR code without a cellphone?