Branding and logos
Existing cycle makers, for the most part, transferred their brand identification from their own manufacture cycles to their fledging motorcycle production. Many had applied their logo in the form of a transfer or badge to their cycle headstock and did the same to their first motorcycles, though later this system was dropped. Usually, the existing cycle headstock transfer was enlarged, and occasionally modified for their motorcycles. In the case of badges, the design was repeated as a transfer, for application to the tank; occasionally, the tanks were hand sign-written. Companies from home and abroad took varying, circuitous routes before arriving at their branding.
Triumph
After two years in the UK, German national Siegfried Bettmann established Bettmann & Co in 1885 with an aim to cash in on the booming cycle trade by exporting and then selling in overseas markets British-manufactured cycles. Siegfried sourced his cycles in Birmingham, before having them branded as the ‘Bettmann.’ Realising for some markets his family name was unsuited for Englishmade cycles, he rebranded them a year later as ‘Triumph.’ And, in 1887, Bettmann and Co became ‘The Triumph Cycle Company.’
Bettmann was joined at this time by engineer and fellow German Mauritz Schulte, who developed his first motorcycles c1901/2 using Minerva kits. These and all following machines (with the exception of a few Villiers 98/147cc lightweights of 1932/3 named the ‘Gloria’) were branded Triumph, a brand still prevalent today, over 120 years later.
Rudge
By the time the first Rudge motorcycles were rolling out of their maker’s Coventry, works
