About Ebykr
Ebykr celebrates classic and vintage lightweight bicycles through provocative imagery and opinion. Ride along with us.
A practical guide to dating a Pierce bicycle from Buffalo — what the head badge says about who built it, why the first two digits are not the year, where a frame number sits on the ladder of dated examples, what the model numbers mean and which features arrived when.
Founded in 1899 as a Tokyo import house trading under a name that meant Japan-America, Fuji is one of the oldest bicycle names still in use anywhere. This timeline follows it from Meiji-era importing through domestic manufacture, a wartime renaming, three Olympic Games, the S10-S that changed the American market, Valite tubing and an early titanium frame, to two bankruptcies and the brand's latest change of hands.
Founded in 1899 as a Tokyo trading house importing American goods, Fuji was Japan's most popular bicycle by the late 1920s and, with the S10-S of 1971, ended the assumption that a serious lightweight had to be European. This is the longer story: the wartime renaming, three Olympic teams designed by a former Asian Games winner, Valite tubing, an early production titanium frame, serial numbers that actually date a frame, two bankruptcies and a brand changing hands again in 2026.
Founded in Chicago in 1895, Schwinn ran an extraordinary double life: a mass-production giant selling balloon-tire cruisers and electro-forged ten-speeds by the million, and a small hand-build shop producing Paramount racing frames and fillet-brazed lightweights that could stand against anything made in Europe. This timeline follows the company from the 1890s boom through the Wastyn Paramounts, the Sting-Ray, the bike boom it failed to capture, two bankruptcies and the 2023 closing of Waterford.
George N. Pierce built birdcages, then tricycles, then some of the finest bicycles of the 1890s — chainless, shaft-driven machines that chased a dream the industry is still chasing today.
From gilded birdcages in a Buffalo workshop to chainless, shaft-driven bicycles that sat at the head of its catalog for 15 years, the history of Pierce is the story of a manufacturer that kept betting on the harder way of…
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