Country: Taiwan

Founded in 1983 by Dr David Hon, Dahon claims to be the worlds largest manufacturer of folding bicycles.

In the early 1980s David Hon was a physicist working on solid-state laser technology at Hughes Aircraft Corporation in California. With a CV like that, I would bet good money that he once had an ‘ASCII Art’ portrait of Jimi Hendrix printed on a line printer by a Fortran program running on an IBM 360. I know I did (or am I confusing Jimi with Che?).

In 1982 Dr Hon decided to forsake the military-industrial complex and designed a high quality folding bicycle (a very rare object at the time). When he failed to license his design to any of the existing bicycle manufacturers, he moved to Taiwan and set up the Dahon company to manufacture it himself.

Dahon now claims to be head-quartered in California, although I have listed the company on this site as being from Taiwan - as that is where it seems to me to be really based. More...