Country: USA

Columbia is the most venerable of all the classic US bicycle brands. It was the creation of Albert Pope, who is often credited with founding the American bicycle industry. Perhaps he should be canonised and appointed as the patron saint of gas piping.

Pope saw a bicycle for the very first time at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, and travelled to Europe to find out what it was all about. He set up the Pope Manufacturing Company in Boston, Massachusetts in 1877 and started to import and manufacture bicycles and bicycle parts. His first ‘Columbia’ bicycle was manufactured for him in 1878 by the Weed Sewing Machine Factory in Hartford Connecticut.

Albert Pope appears to have patented the idea of the bicycle in the USA and licensed his patent to anyone wishing to produce bicycles - in exchange for a license fee of around $10 per bicycle. In the period up to 1890 Pope started to buy up bicycle manufacturers and, by 1890, his company, now based in Hartford Connecticut, was manufacturing around 250,000 bicycles a year. More...