Pierce Company Bicycles: The Missing Link

While the bicycles most of us are familiar with today rely on chains as the centerpiece of their drivetrain, there is always someone who thinks there must be a better way to make our beloved two-wheeled machines go. (Note the naming story behind Spécialités TA, for example.) While many innovators try building a better mousetrap, so to speak, few are true originals and even fewer approach what any of us would consider success. Enter the late George Norman Pierce, builder of wonderful things. And mundane things, too, made wonderfully.

In 1863, a 17 year old Mr. Pierce picked up his life in Friendsville, Pennsylvania and headed to Buffalo, New York in search of opportunity. After settling down and putting a few years’ work under his belt, Pierce formed a household goods manufacturing business. Charles Heinz, George Pierce and George Munschauer successfully produced a variety of items together, ranging from ornate bathtubs to gilded birdcages to insulated iceboxes to fancy pull wagons. Something for everyone, as they say. (I’m looking at you, Bridgestone Eurasia!)

Time would tell this formative experience offered Pierce the first of many valuable lessons in industrial manufacturing and market segmentation. So attuned was he that — had his greatest innovation been better received by a fickle buying public (and perhaps been given a bit longer to evolve) — we might not even recognize the modern bicycle as it is still known and celebrated today. Allow me to explain, one turn of the crank at a time, with nary a concern for chain maintenance or greasy pants…

From Birdcages to Bicycles

The George N. Pierce Company was established in 1878 when Pierce went his own way and decided to compete with his former partners. Within 10 years of forming the new company, Pierce expanded his product lineup of mostly housewares to include a series of children’s tricycles targeted at the lowest end of the nascent recreational transportation market. The Pierce three-wheelers he built for children ages 3-15 were an immediate hit in this new and red-hot market.

A year later, riding on the resounding success of his tricycles, Pierce added bicycles to his range of offerings. Although bicycles of this era were very different from the carbon fiber, 24-plus speed demons that manufacturers are pumping out today, the rate of technological change occurring then was every bit as revolutionary as today’s trend toward composites and additional gears (mostly within the same range, though).

The first bicycles released by Pierce in 1889 were available not just as hard-tired models, but also models featured with the previous year’s groundbreaking invention, the pneumatic tire. The air-filled tire, invented by John Boyd Dunlop, was his attempt to smooth out his young son’s rides over Belfast’s infamously rugged cobblestone streets. Legend holds the first examples of Dunlop’s tires were fashioned from rounds of inflated garden hose. The so-called “safety bicycles” offered by the George N. Pierce Company during this time featured two same-sized wheels. The social implications resulting from these developments have proven enormous in the subsequent century-plus.

A Social Revolution on Two Wheels

The predecessors of these “safety” bicycles were high-wheeled machines. Although such machines offered great sport and enjoyment for men, women in the long skirts and bustles of the day found them virtually impossible to ride. Women were thusly relegated to tricycles that were slower and more cumbersome, yet accommodating to the figure-covering fashions they popularly wore. Transportation and accompaniment of the woman was still a man’s duty and responsibility. Women were tradition-bound to being escorted by their male companions while men were free to hop on their bikes and ride.

The safety bicycle, a universally useful vehicle for commuting and recreation, inspired a generation of women to shed their overwhelmingly bulky garb in favor of clothing allowing them to participate in the freedom of cycling. Victorian corsets and bustles were removed quickly as bike-friendly bloomers allowed women to straddle bicycles and finally ride themselves. In the words of women’s rights advocate Susan B. Anthony, the bicycle was an innovation that did “more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”

The Chainless Gambit

The chain-driven bicycle was still a reasonably new invention, but George Pierce quickly recognized it had room for improvement, especially given the widening audiences bicycles were now attracting. Although chain drives afforded the efficient transfer of human power to bicycle wheel, they were dirty contraptions that took a heavy toll on the commuting public’s pant legs. This led Pierce to fit his bicycles with a new type of chainless system — the shaft drive. At the turn of the 20th century, the Pierce Hygienic Cushion Frame bicycle equipped with a spring fork, telescopic suspension stem, shaft drive and pneumatic tires was the crème de la crème of bicycles now catering to a market with increasingly sophisticated (and upscale) sensibilities.

The chainless drive was never a budget novelty for Pierce, but rather a top of the line offering. In the company’s own catalog, the Cushion Frame Chainless stood at the head of the range at $80.00. This was above the Pierce-Kramer Special Racer, named for Frank L. Kramer, the American professional champion, and well above the $40.00 roadsters beneath it. Its distinction was mechanical as much as it was clean: the rear stays and the gear box formed a single unit that pivoted on a large rocker bearing at the crank bracket, oscillating with the sprung cushion frame so that a jolt could never throw the bevel gears out of line. Married to a spring fork and low gear, Pierce advertised the resulting system as producing the most comfortable bicycle on earth. The company built it with the same open-hearth brazing, four hand-rubbed coats of enamel and thousandth-of-an-inch bearing fits that carried the boast every rival envied — “GOOD AS A PIERCE.”

From Motorette to Pierce-Arrow

In 1901, Pierce introduced the gas-powered “Motorette” at that year’s Pan-American Exposition. Although the automobiles attracted plenty of attention, Pierce was also well represented by bicycles, including the Exposition’s police force putting them to good use.

Once Pierce showed the Motorette to intrigued bicycle dealers, the company realized enormous production growth and was forced to vacate its Hanover Street production facilities in favor of a newly built, 15-acre production plant on Elmwood Avenue at Great Arrow in Buffalo.

In 1908, the Pierce-Arrow Motor Car Company was hatched. Although the company was poised to make among the finest vehicles of the time, George N. Pierce had already jumped ship, selling his family interest in the business in 1907. Carl F. Burgwardt, longtime proprietor of the Pedaling History Bicycle Museum near Buffalo, offered the following statement to help explain Pierce’s action:

“George Pierce was probably more of a bicycle person than an automobile person. While he was the founder and principal officer in his bicycle business for more than 20 years, he was only in the automobile business for eight. By the time the automobiles were being produced in his bicycle plant, although he was still president of the company, other major stockholders were those most involved with the automobile.”

It is interesting to note although “Pierce-Arrow” is the common brand by which all products of the company are known, bicycles that emerged from the business were never Pierce-Arrow bicycles, but were instead products of the Pierce Cycle Company. This misnomer is possibly due to early Pierce bicycles exhibiting an arrow-shaped logo on their headtube badges.

Three years after leaving his namesake company, George N. Pierce succumbed to a heart attack. Although his retirement was short, the legacies Pierce left in the bicycle and automobile industries were substantial. Products produced by Pierce and subsequently Pierce-Arrow were known for their quality and design. Nonetheless the shaft-drive system championed by the Pierce Cycle Company never gained widespread adoption. It limited riders to a few gears within a narrow range of ratios and made for an unreasonably heavy drivetrain.

From Champion to Constable

Pierce built for the whole spread of riders, and the range says as much about the marque as the chainless model does. At the sporting end stood the Pierce-Kramer Special Racer, a stripped machine of the best high-carbon tubing, built in a single twenty-one-inch size and weighing barely twenty pounds on its silk tires. It carried the name of Frank L. Kramer, the American professional champion for 15 years and holder of a string of world titles, who had helped shape its lines and rode an exact duplicate in competition. Pierce was direct about its purpose: this was, in the company’s own words, a bicycle for racing purposes only.

At the other end of the range were the workaday machines, the one-piece and two-piece hanger roadsters a family bought to ride to work or church, and between the extremes sat one model that spoke to Pierce’s reputation for strength. The Arch Truss, or Police Model, braced with an extra tube arching just below the top tube, was adopted by the New York Police Department, a service with little patience for a frame that might fail under hard daily use. From the champion’s featherweight to the constable’s roadster, the same open-hearth joints and piano-polish enamel ran through every frameset that left Hanover Street.

The Chainless Dream, a Century On

Pierce’s limited success with the chainless bicycle has not stopped others from chasing the dream of a cleaner drivetrain. Well over a century later, shaft-driven city bikes remain in production around the world, and the 2000s saw a fresh wave of American optimism. Massachusetts-based Dynamic Bicycles promised at the time that its shaft-drive system…

“Eliminates the number one complaint people have always had about their bikes — the chains and derailleurs. With our shaft drive bikes, there is no more grease; no more mess; no more cuts on fingers or tears in clothes; and no more chain and derailleur maintenance. Just pure, worry-free riding fun.”

To anyone who has spent hours elbow-deep in chain lube, degreaser and bearing (er, cassette) brushes after a tiring ride, it certainly sounds like a dream worth chasing. Dynamic has since gone the way of the Motorette and the reasons echo across 125 years of bicycle evolution. Indeed, a new Dynamic Bicycles now specializes in providing custom-branded bicycle fleets and bike share systems tailored for hotels, apartment communities, corporate campuses and college campuses.

Ask the collectors who still ride surviving Pierce chainless machines and the verdict has changed remarkably little. Described by riders as “heavy, slow but smooth,” requiring “little maintenance – but when it does it’s real expensive” and possessing a “poor range of available gears,” the shaft drive still struggles against the same limitations it carried in 1901. Go figure. The concept’s true heirs have instead arrived in another form: the toothed carbon belt drive (Gates), paired with an internally geared hub (Rohloff, Nexus), now delivers the clean and quiet ride Pierce promised — and has quietly become standard equipment on commuters and touring machines worldwide.

From freestyle BMX to time trialing, bicycles and their uses have changed dramatically since the safety bicycle first took to the streets in the late 1800s. It remains interesting to note that while much has been improved, much else remains the same. The spring shocks and chained drivetrains of yesteryear look similarly familiar on today’s bicycles. Perhaps “time tested” really does stand for something, all these years later.

Modern-day manufacturers may spiff up their products with space-age materials, but the core concepts mostly remain the same. Indeed, technological advances allow today’s manufacturers to produce bicycles capable of substantially higher performance thresholds than their predecessors. In terms of pure innovative ambition, though, Pierce’s chainless drivetrain remains in a very, very rare class. Too bad they did not work better.

Dating a Pierce chainless

Pinning a year to an early Pierce is difficult and no published serial-number key survives. What we have instead is a slowly-growing record of documented examples. Pierce brought its shaft-drive chainless to market in 1900 (patented two years earlier) as the Model 294 and the frame numbers that are tied to a year climb steadily through the model’s short life: documented 1900 machines fall around 69,000 to 75,000, while a well-preserved 1902 Pan-American Special carries frame number 94,344.

A chainless Pierce numbered in that range therefore belongs to the earliest 1900s, running higher with each passing year. The fittings help to confirm it: the cushion frame and the New Departure coaster hub mark the chainless line, and the spring fork was a new option for 1902 — the year Pierce turned the Pan-American Special, named for Buffalo’s 1901 Pan-American Exposition, into a state-of-the-art transportation machine.

None of this amounts to a key, only a set of clues to weigh together, and the deepest Pierce research lives with collectors and museums such as The Classic and Antique Bicycle Exchange (CABE) and the Online Bicycle Museum. If you own an early Pierce, adding its frame number to the Ebykr Serial-Number Registry helps that record grow.

Across Pierce’s whole output the frame numbers climb over the long run without ever settling into a clean yearly code. Documented machines run from the middle 50,000s in the late 1890s, through the low 100,000s in the years before the First World War, to well past 200,000 by the early 1920s — a broad upward drift, but a noisy one, with numbers from consecutive years freely overlapping.

The firmest fix comes from the wartime years, when Pierces listed as stolen in the newspapers of 1918 and 1919 carry numbers between roughly 172,000 and 197,000. That is why a serial number alone will not date a Pierce, and why a shortcut that circulates among collectors, reading the first two digits as the year, falls apart on the evidence: a frame stamped 256,237 was built in 1922, and one stamped 55,972 dates to the 1890s. The number can hide in several places as well: the underside of the bottom-bracket shell, the seat tube or lug, a rear dropout or even beneath the crank.

The model designation offers a further clue. Pierce named its machines by number and the number carried meaning: a tier for the kind of bicycle and within it a figure for the frame size. In the Pierce Cycle Company range, the cushion-frame chainless wore the highest numbers of all, 152 for the twenty-two-inch frame and 154 for the twenty-four, while the cushion-frame chain models sat in the 130s and the plain roadsters lower still. The exact numbers shifted between the early chainless models of the 1900s and the later catalogs, so a model number is best read against its catalog rather than in isolation. Matched to the right catalog, a model number can name the type, the size and often the year at a stroke.

What model number is your Pierce and what year was it made?

Adapted and expanded from an original article by Susan Earle.

Special thanks to Chuck LaChiusa and his wonderful Buffalo Architecture and Historical web site and to Colin Kirsch of the unrivaled Online Bicycle Museum, each of whom deserves a deep measure of gratitude for their important roles in keeping the distinctly American, especially innovative Pierce Bicycle Company alive in all of our imaginations.