Congratulations to Ulrich Weitz, who was the first person to correctly identify that this is a Triumph Fips!
A bonus point goes to fallingdown4u, who was able to track down a different photo of the exact same bike I took my own picture of at the Museo Moto Bassella in Spain a couple of years ago.
Here’s the original photo without the Triumph and Sachs logos removed:
Here’s the Fips in all of its glory:
Did you know that Triumph was founded as a bicycle manufacturer by a German named Siegfried Bettman in 1886? Siegfried would go on to create another bicycle manufacturer a decade later in his hometown of Nuremberg, and he called it the “German Triumph Cycle Company.” Later on, it was re-branded as TWN (Triumph-Werke Nürnberg), and that’s the company that made this rare, weirdly-named scooter.
The Fips was only sold in 1956 and 1957, and it features a Sachs 47cc 2-stroke motor paired with a 2-speed transmission. I’m hoping to share more bikes with you from the excellent Museo Moto Bassella this week, but there’s so many of them that I’m breaking them up into categories. Here’s the off-roaders!