(his pen name, after all, came from riverboats), he insisted on calling the handlebar a tiller and ended the essay with, “Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.”58
Other manufacturing companies such as Ford and Singer built stores to sell their products. Pope did not. If a consumer wanted to purchase a bike, the buyer had to go to a hardware store or visit an agent who sold Columbias.59 That quirk did not seem to keep customers away, and Pope knew it wouldn’t. A Columbia was a specialty item, and so was its owner. Pope was appealing to the modern man—most riders were male—who was willing to stand out in a crowd and spend no small amount of energy tracking down his product. Other manufacturing luminaries, including Henry Ford, came to visit the Hartford plant for inspiration. Before Ford became famous for it, Pope’s employees used interchangeable bicycle wheels, tires, and gear-shaft drive mechanisms, a technique they learned from Fairfield and one borrowed by Ford with great success.
Early bicycles were mostly ridden by men. Female cyclists had to first be convinced to wear bloomers (or “rational dress”) to allow for peddling. 1895. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540.
By 1896 the plant had a thousand machines turning out screws at tens of thousands per minute, according to a 1918 American Machinist magazine article. The machines included “milling machines, turret lathes, screw machines, grinding machines, drilling and boring machines.”60 Within ten years, Pope stood before a crowd in Philadelphia and said that American-made bicycles had taken over the world market—in part because the Hartford factory included an entire division devoted to modifying the product to suit the riders of a particular country’s needs.61 Pope’s Hartford operations grew to include five factories that employed four thousand people.62 Meanwhile, in an 1896 interview with the London-based publication Cycling World, Pope said there was no limit to the bicycle market. At $125 the bicycle was pricey for the average consumer, yet sales quickly hit one thousand a year. George Keller, who designed Pope’s factory housing, told his wife that Pope couldn’t even sell him a bicycle because the factory had orders they couldn’t begin to fulfill. (Keller also designed Bushnell Park’s “Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch,” of Portland brownstone.63 His ashes are buried in the arch along with the ashes of his wife, Mary.)
Early (and bizarre) Columbia bicycle ad.
While the bicycle design was vamped and revamped, the Hartford plant was among the first in the country to switch from coal to kerosene fuel.64 Ever the competitor, Pope began buying patents as quickly as he could. Ford did the same thing. Pope also employed a knack for self-promotion unrivaled by any of his contemporaries, save perhaps Barnum. In this, Ford could not compete. Pope once told an interviewer that his perfect employee was the most faithful fellow in the world. “He has been in my employ for 17 years, yet he has never even asked for a holiday. He works both day and night, is never asleep or intoxicated, and though I pay him more than $250,000 a year, I consider that he costs me nothing. His name is Advertisement.”65
Pope mostly treated his (human) employees as would a benevolent dictator. He was generous at Christmas, and before there was such a thing as workers’ insurance, he was quick to send money to the families of ill employees. An 1893 magazine article praised Pope for his factory’s washrooms, which included hot and cold water sinks, as well as a library and reading room and a stable for workers to store their bicycles, since most of them rode to work.66
That benevolence shifted a bit when workers threatened to join a machinists’ union in 1901. The factory shut down briefly but opened again when negotiators agreed to let workers form committees, though not a union.67 Pope also agreed to a nine-hour day and a raise in pay.
Many of Frog Hollow’s industrialists had served their apprenticeships beneath the blue dome of Colt’s in the southeastern part of the city, but not Pope. Yet both Pope and Colt understood that their fortunes depended on their workers’ happiness. Pope purchased land that had been the old Bartholomew family farm to the southwest of his factory, and donated ninety acres for the creation of a park. Designed by the famous Olmsted brothers, the park included tennis courts and a rolling lawn. Pope said, “I believe that a large part of the success of any manufacturing enterprise depends on the health, happiness and orderly life of its employees.”68
To hawk his bikes, Pope sponsored races and a bicycle-riding school and promoted public parks as tremendous places to test a bike. He countered certain clergy members’ assertions that bike riding on Sunday was wrong with the suggestion that churches build bike barns similar to the ones outside his factory, so worshippers could ride to church. And wasn’t exercise a form of worshipping God?
He also founded the League of American Wheelmen, pushed for better roads through a magazine devoted to the joys of cycling, and endowed positions in highway engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to make the roads smoother.69 Without good roads, Pope knew, bicycles were little more than expensive paperweights.
But as with the Weed bust of a few years earlier, the bicycle boom was relatively short-lived. By the turn of the last century, consumers began to crave transportation that did not require pedaling. Pope’s company was slightly slow to catch on, and for a few months they suffered from overproduction amid falling demand. But then Pope started a Motor Carriage Department. And there Pope applied the same energy to the creation of his version of the horseless carriage. The first product was an electric car, the “Mark III,” in 1897. Using technology honed in the manufacture of bicycles, the Pope plant “was truly the nursery of the infant [automobile] industry,” according to one observer.70 Just as they had figured out how to keep bicycle riders from pitching over the handlebars, Pope engineers began to finesse electric motors.
In short order, American consumers could choose from the Pope-Tribune, the Pope-Waverly, the Pope-Toledo, and the Pope-Hartford, a midpriced auto that went for $3,200 and was priced squarely between Ford models that sold for $1,000–$2,000 and the higher-priced Packard at $7,000.71 By 1899 Pope had all but single-handedly turned Hartford into the center of the automotive world.72
Two of Pope’s employees, George H. Day and Hiram Percy Maxim, set out to create workable engines, but Day’s heart was not in gasoline-powered contraptions. In fact, by one account, when faced with an engine, he shook his head and asked if the engines had to have so many gears and so much oil. “We are on the wrong track,” Day was supposed to have said. “No one will buy a carriage that has to have all that greasy machinery in it. It might be that young fellows like you … would buy a few of them as interesting toys, but that would be only a drop in the bucket.”73
Pope wholeheartedly agreed, “because you can’t get people to sit over an explosion.”74 (Sigh.)
While Pope’s employees focused on perfecting a two-seated electric car—also called the Columbia—Midwest manufacturers, Henry Ford among them, were aiming for the middle market with mass-produced (and cheaper) manufacturing. In 1899 Pope’s company produced more than half of the cars in the United States.75 The Courant predicted in 1905 that the Columbia car was showing massive improvement, due in part to the addition of nickel-steel parts. The company would continue its production of electric delivery wagons and trucks and was entertaining large advance orders.76
But along with Thomas Edison, Ford was as talented as an industrialist as he was skilled at lawyering up. Pope and Ford rather quickly went to court, and eventually Pope’s legal issues with Ford took too much time and energy. That, along with his reluctance to pursue a workable gas engine, relegated
