returning from the Centennial Exposition, Pope decided to pursue the business of manufacturing and selling ordinary bicycles—having first learned to ride and enjoy the vehicle himself at his home in Boston—and had purchased a batch of fifty ordinary bicycles from England, with which he intended to test the market. However, rather than retool his factory in Boston to manufacture bicycles, Pope thought it best to find a business partner to make the bicycles for him, while he focused his talents as a salesman on promoting the product. As he himself once said, “I could not make a bicycle if my life depended on it, but I know how to sell them.”8
The Weed Sewing Machine Company, headed by George A. Fairfield, a fellow Civil War colonel, was a logical choice. The firm was well respected in the shoe manufacturing industry with which Pope was familiar, and had in place a skilled workforce that was experienced in making interchangeable parts. As it happened, the sewing machine business was then in a slump, and whether Pope was aware of it or not, the Weed Company was looking for a new source of revenue. So when Pope approached Fairfield with an offer to make a batch of fifty ordinary bicycles for him based on the Duplex Excelsior—to be sold under the American trade name Columbia—Fairfield accepted.
Even with a prototype at hand, however, manufacturing the bicycles proved a daunting task. To replicate the English model, Weed Company engineers had to design and forge seventy-seven unique parts, some of which required large and expensive dies costing hundreds of dollars. Each part also had to have a production tolerance small enough to be interchangeable from one bicycle to another. Only the solid rubber tires were to be purchased from an outside supplier.
The bicycles were completed by fall, and to Pope’s delight the first batch of fifty ordinary bicycles made in America sold out quickly, along with the fifty Duplex Excelsior cycles that Pope imported from England. With one hundred units sold and a rash of unfilled orders still in hand, Pope increased production and during the following year sold an additional one thousand ordinary bicycles through Columbia agents that he established in cities such as Hartford, Boston, New York, and Chicago. By the end of 1879, both Pope and Fairfield were convinced that a new American industry had been born in Hartford, Connecticut.9
The Columbia ordinary was not the first “bicycle” to be ridden in Connecticut. Its earliest ancestor, a European invention called the “dandy horse” velocipede, appeared in American cities as early as 1819, including New Haven, where it excited the interest of Yale students. Unlike the ordinary bicycle, this earlier model looked more like the bicycle we know today. It had reasonable thirty-inch wheels front and back “and a saddle between them on which the rider sits.” There were, however, no pedals to propel the dandy horse, which moved only when the rider, “touching his feet to the ground, sets the wheels in motion, and keeps them rolling by now and then lightly touching the ground.”10 Seeing an opportunity to make some quick money, local carriage makers produced cheap copies of the dandy horse and rented them out to interested riders by the day or month, until dandy-horse bicycles were seen around New Haven “in great numbers.”11 But as its name implied, the dandy horse was viewed more as an amusement than a mode of transportation, and so the fad soon faded.
A half century later, a second bicycle craze took place in Connecticut, after a French mechanic named Pierre Lallement had modified the velocipede’s design by adding foot pedals to the hub of the machine’s front wheel and a steerable front column that allowed the rider to power and direct the bicycle by pedaling. Unable to arouse interest in his invention in Paris, Lallement came to Connecticut in 1865 where he took a job at a machine shop in Ansonia. Once established, he assembled the bicycle he had brought with him to America, and pedaled his way into New Haven, where a newsman saw him and recorded the event for posterity. “An enterprising individual propelled himself about the Green last evening on a curious frame sustained by two wheels, one before the other, and driven by foot cranks.”12
Though Lallement’s velocipede was a smart improvement on what had come before, its iron-rimmed, wooden wheels made for an uncomfortable ride, and the machine was soon dubbed the “boneshaker.” Despite this limitation, Lallement’s bone-shaking velocipede sparked a second bicycle fad throughout the Northeast. This time, riding academies and cycling rinks appeared in cities around the state, including New Haven. At Yale, a student noted in the college’s Literary Magazine that business at several indoor rinks was brisk and that he had to wait in line for two hours to take a fifteen-minute ride on a boneshaker, which cost him one cent per minute. Some riders went so far as to pay a premium to usurp the time slot of a person who had lined up ahead of them.
Despite the boneshaker craze, Lallement was unable to find an American investor or manufacturer willing to turn his prototype invention into a commercial product, in part because he was “a pleasant young man … incapable in every way of promoting his invention.” So Lallement returned to Paris “no closer to fortune than when he had left,” and America’s second velocipede craze came to a close.
In the 1870s, the bicycle manufacturers of England developed the high-mount ordinary design, mainly out of engineering necessity. Since the technology of chain drive and gearing had yet to be perfected, the only way to increase the power and speed of a bicycle like Lallement’s boneshaker—with pedals attached to the hub of its front wheel—was to increase the diameter of the front, or power, wheel. This led to the odd-looking design of the ordinary bicycle, with a front wheel fifty inches or more in diameter, which was kept from twisting out of roundness by a mesh of metal spokes. It was just such a top-of-the-line, English-made ordinary bicycle, on display at the Centennial Exposition of 1876, that had captured Colonel Pope’s imagination.
With production well underway and his first thousand ordinary bicycles sold, Pope instructed Fairfield to design an improved model that utilized lighter tubing and smoother bearings for an improved ride. As a result of ubiquitous advertising and a team of salesmen who traveled the country demonstrating and promoting the improved Columbia ordinary bicycle, sales continued to rise, and within a few years the Weed Sewing Machine Company in Hartford became the largest bicycle factory in the world, having increased production to one thousand ordinary bicycles each month, and selling them at an affordable retail price of one hundred dollars apiece. By now, of course, other manufacturers entered the lucrative cycling market. But such was the high quality and popularity of Pope’s product that the improved Columbia accounted for two-thirds of all ordinary bicycles sold in America.13
Perhaps the most notorious owner of a Columbia ordinary was Hartford’s own Mark Twain, who purchased his bicycle directly from the Weed factory, along with lessons from an instructor who taught him to ride in the privacy of his own backyard. Twain described the experience with usual humor, equating the high-mount bicycle to the familiar horse it was intended to replace:
Mine was not a full-grown bicycle, but only a colt—a fifty-inch, with the pedals shortened up to forty-eight—and skittish, like any other colt. The Expert explained the things points briefly, then he got on its back and rode around a little, to show me how easy it was to do. He said that the dismounting was perhaps the hardest thing to learn, and so we would leave that to the last. But he was in error there. He found, to his surprise and joy, that all he needed to do was to get me on to the machine and stand out of the way … Although I was wholly inexperienced, I dismounted in the best time on record.14
In the 1880s, English bicycle manufacturers developed an effective chain drive and gearing system, which allowed them to detach the drive pedals from the hub of the front wheel, equalize the diameter of the bicycle’s two wheels at a reasonable size, and let the rider utilize both wheels in propelling the vehicle. The new design was called the “safety bicycle”—the ride, and the dismount in particular, being much safer than that of an ordinary bicycle—and subsequent improvements, including pneumatic tires, lightweight tubular frames, and coaster brakes, now made bicycling accessible to the masses and for the first time opened the market to women and children.
Keeping up with technological
