Overview

This topic can be integrated into unit on industrialization/innovation in late 19th century for Grade 8 or Grade 10.

Lesson plan contents:

• Introduction
• Supporting questions
• Purpose
• Historical Context 
• How to: Classroom setup
• What's next: Informed action
  
• Resources
• Printable version

Introduction

Around the turn of the 20th century, Colonel Albert Pope manufactured his popular and profitable Columbia bicycles in Hartford at the Columbia factory of the Pope Manufacturing Company. This company, in 1895, was the largest employer in New England and made Hartford the “bicycle capital of the world”. Pope’s use of patents, investments in the supply chain and his efforts to improve road conditions and bicycle safety made him a top leader in the manufacturing and transportation industry.

Supporting Questions

Eco 9-12.4 and Eco 9-12.5 refer to the Connecticut Social Studies Frameworks.

Purpose

Students will understand the importance of innovation in manufacturing in Hartford and analyze the impact of the bicycle on consumers as well as public policy.

Historical Context

By 1895, Albert Augustus Pope’s Columbia bicycles were a national phenomenon and his Hartford-based Pope Manufacturing Company was the largest employer in New England. Not only had Pope used what one employee called his “master showman’s mind” to popularize his products and turn Hartford into the bicycle capital of the world, he also proved able to predict trends in the transportation industry.

Pope placed himself among the leaders in adapting to these changes. For example, in an effort to expand the market for his products, he became an advocate for improving the nation’s roadways. Later, anticipating the popularity of motorized transportation, Pope built plants capable of producing more than 2,000 automobiles per year, making him America’s leading automaker at the turn of the 20th century. The obstacles he faced in his efforts to bring quiet and clean-running electric cars to market presaged the challenges later automakers would encounter.

Albert Pope, born on May 20, 1843, was the fourth of eight children born to Charles and Elizabeth Pope of Boston, Massachusetts. Charles was born into a 200-year-old family legacy of success in the lumber industry. Rather than join the family business, Charles opted to go out on his own and began a career in real estate speculation. Initial prosperity quickly turned to despair when his business collapsed in 1852. During this time, nine-year-old Albert went to work plowing fields on a neighbor’s farm. At age 12, he began selling fruits and vegetables, and by age 15 he had dropped out of school and taken a job working at Quincy Market.

In 1871, Pope married Abby Linder, with whom he had six children. By then he was a Civil War veteran, having joined the 1st Company, 35th Massachusetts Volunteer regiment at 19 and gone into battle under the command of such notable generals as Ulysses S. Grant and Ambrose Burnside. He was named a lieutenant colonel for battlefield bravery and was referred to as “Colonel Pope” for the rest of his life. After the war, he started a shoe-supply business with $900 he had saved while in the Union army. In less than a year his business was the largest of its kind in the country.

The 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia was the turning point in Albert Pope’s professional life. There he saw his first bicycle and became so enamored of it that he sped off to Europe to study how bicycles were made. After acquiring the American rights to the patents, Pope approached the Weed Sewing Machine Company about using the empty wings of its Hartford plant to produce 50 “test” velocipedes (a catchall term for early foot-powered vehicles with one or more wheels). Pope’s two-wheeled models proved such a success that the plant was soon producing more bicycles than sewing machines. By the end of the 1880s, the Weed factory was producing 5,000 bicycles a year, and Pope, who was by then selling his product nationally, bought the plant outright.

A knack for advertising to the masses contributed to Pope’s success, as did controlling the supply chain for his products—an approach to innovation that lowered costs and broadened his customer base. For example, in 1892 Pope brought much of the material production in-house, buying the Hartford Rubber Works, a steel company, and the largest nickel-plating factory in the world. Now in control of the production of his raw materials, he sought new ways to lighten the weight of his 70-pound bicycles.

By hollowing out the bike’s steel tubes and limiting wheel friction, he was able to make his bicycles lighter and easier to pedal, allowing him to expand the market for his bikes to women and children. Women in the late 19th century were quick to embrace the new-found sense of freedom and mobility that came with bicycling. So closely associated were bicycles to the concept of independence and liberation, that civil rights activist and suffragist Susan B. Anthony declared, “The bicycle has done more for the emancipation of women than anything in the world.”

Closely tied to the opportunity to expand the market for bicycles was the need for higher-quality roads on which to ride them. In the late-19th century, roads outside of major cities were largely comprised of rutted dirt paths. Pope recognized just how essential good road conditions were for increasing his sales and improving the ability to move supplies and products in and out of his Hartford facilities. In 1880, he founded the Good Roads Movement and the League of American Wheelmen, an organization meant to promote greater government participation in building America’s roads. Pope encouraged teachers to begin instructing students on road building as early as kindergarten, and he lobbied the United States Congress to create a government department in charge of roads. In “A Memorial to Congress on the Subject of a Road Department” in February of 1893, he stated his case very clearly:

“The people everywhere throughout the country are awakening to the vast importance of better highways. They more fully realize not only the great commercial advantages of good roads but they see more clearly that the material highways of the country are highways in a spiritual sense as well; that the growth of society, education, and Christianity depend largely upon good means of communication between home, school, and church, and that no nation can advance in civilization which does not make a corresponding advance in the betterment of its highways.”

—From Albert Augustus Pope, Transportation Pioneer, by Gregg Mangan