Circle Factories. A Small Chain of Being Between Guns, Sewing Machines, Bikes and Cars

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 962

"The Circle Factory." Well, not quite.  Actually, not at all.  The first image is just a detail from the warehouse of the ubiquitous Columbia bicycle works in 1881.  The second aren’t even circles, but cosmological ovals, and is a detail of a wood engraving depicting planetary and  cometary  orbits in Leonhard Euler’s Theoria Motuum Planetarum et Cometarum (1631-1635). 

The bicycle wheels appeared in Bicycling World (for April 1881, “A Great American Manufacture”), illustrating a story about the growing interest in bicycles in America but more specifically the success of the partnership between the Weed Sewing Machine factory and Albert A. Pope in the mass production of the bike.  It was a newish idea, partially borrowed from the Sharps Manufacturing

Company’s mass production of weapons with standardized parts, which was employed in the production of sewing machines by Weed, and then on to bikes by Pope.  Actually Weed took the step further than Sharps by producing almost all of their machines in-house, having a foundry and forge right there at the factory.  It was this step and then other innovations by Pope that produced an enormously successful bicycle production company, with something like a quarter million bikes made in the first few years of operation. 

The Weed-Pope domination didn’t last long though, what with the introduction of the remarkable safety bicycle from England in 1887—this is instantly recognizable as a “modern” bike, with a chain power train and two same-size wheels. In two years there were hundreds of companies building those bikes, producing a million a year.  

By 1895 this balloon busted, and for some reason Americans stopped buying bikes, with demand falling off to nearly nil, causing the vast majority of these companies to whither and fold, causing the whole of the bicycle interest to come first circle. Or cycle.

But there was a huge lesson learned for future manufacturers of transportation devices—namely cars, and more specifically, Ford(s), drawing critical lessons in production from forging methods and sustainable assembly lines. 

Euler has nothing to do with bikes or Fords, but he did have a whole heck of a lot to do with circles. (Actually, I just liked the image set against the big bike wheels.)