Peddling Bicycles to America The Rise of an Industry

After becoming enamored with English high-wheeled bicycles during a visit to the Philadelphia World's Fair in 1876, Pope soon started paying Hartford, Connecticut's Weed Sewing Machine Company to make his own brand of high-wheeler, the "Columbia," the first to be manufactured in America in significant numbers. A decade later, Pope bought out that company, and a decade after that, Hartford's Park River was lined with five of Pope's factories. This book tells the story of the Pope Manufacturing Company's meteoric rise and fall and the growth of an industry around it.