Triumph Motorcycles

Triumph's roots go back to 1885, when German emigre Siegfried Bettmann founded a bicycle company in Coventry, England - first trading under his own name before renaming it Triumph the following year. The company built its first motorcycle in 1902, pairing a sturdy bicycle frame with an imported Belgian Minerva engine, and was building its own engines in-house within a few years. Triumph's early reputation was cemented during the First World War, when it supplied more than 50,000 Model H "Trusty Triumph" motorcycles to Allied forces - a bike often credited as one of the first genuinely modern motorcycle designs. The original company later fell into decline, but in the 1980s property developer John Bloor bought the Triumph name and its Coventry site, invested in an entirely new factory in Hinckley, and relaunched the brand at the 1990 Cologne Motorcycle Show. That Hinckley-built modern Triumph, blending classic styling with contemporary engineering, is the company that carries the name today.