It's not a household name, not even in households full of cyclists. When first researching it on the mighty Internet most paths led to folks named Bayliss marrying others named Wiley. All of that belies a few simple facts, though:
Bayliss-Wiley Co. Ltd. was a highly respected designer and manufacturer of bicycle components, ahead-of-its-time inventor of products employing honestly modern concepts, and component supplier to other British companies in both the cycling and automotive industries — for nearly a century.
Fuzzy background notwithstanding, Bayliss-Wiley has perhaps the most convoluted history of any bicycle-related manufacturing company ever to exist. Its lifecycle detoured the company into and out of motorcar production, at one point buying, then selling, then merging with another company, and finally being absorbed into Renold Chains Ltd. around 1959 before fading altogether a decade later.
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Like so many useful things, cycling apparel was difficult to obtain in Europe after World War One. The region had been thoroughly ravished by a half-decade of brutal conflict and matters of sport went largely unaddressed by all but its most ardent supporters. Margaret Holdsworth, longtime British postal service employee with a family history in textiles, was one such supportive soul.
Holdsworth began selling shorts, plus fours and skirts that were met with growing demand for cycling apparel. Riders craved their still-familiar comforts while seeking to distance themselves from the viciousness of 1914-1918. Four years into her venture, “Mrs. H” issued the company's inaugural catalog, “Aids to Happy Cycling,” right from her home in Kent.
Definitive Holdsworth historian Norman Kilgariff recounts how the then-free distribution extended beyond cycling apparel into componentry. The 1930 edition shows a small selection of tires, brakes and pedals accompanying the more traditional company offerings of clothing, saddlebags and camping items. These items were available at four distinct locations in the London metropolitan area.
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Raleigh has its phoenix, Colnago its ace of clubs, Fuji its stylized mountain, and Schwinn its four-pointed star, but Legnano may be the only bicycle company whose headbadge depicts a sword-lofting warrior, Alberto da Giussano, celebrating triumph — specifically, the triumph — at the Battle of Legnano in 1176, when the "Free Communes" of the Lombardi league, led by Milan, finally defeated and cast out the German rulers who had been lording over them the previous couple centuries.
That this remains important to Italians may be evidenced by the mention of Legnano in that country's national anthem — the only other city mentioned being Rome itself.
Why it was important to a bicycle manufacturer, even an Italian one, may be a trickier question. National pride? Perhaps. The smell of victory attached to the name? More likely, given Legnano's output includes a long, rich lineage of pure racing bikes as only Italians produce, and an impressive roster of victories on the road race circuits.
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Hearing it might shock the average rider of your swoopy, parrot-painted Italiano-alluminio wonderbike, but many such bikes are actually way, way old skool. In fact they're so old skool they still spell it "old school." Aluminum frames? Octagonal tubes? Coupled bikes that disassemble with a few twists of a wrench for easy traveling? How about a sub-13-lb. featherweight, ready to ride all day long? Nothing new, baby! Pierre Caminade had those numbers dialed way back in 1936.
And he wasn't even first with most of those "firsts."
What goes around really comes around, and history repeats itself with puzzling regularity. Indeed those eternally forgetting their past seem ever doomed to repeating it, too often then patting themselves on the back for reinventing it, smug and clueless about the real innovators.
But for at least fourteen years in the mid 20th century, Caminade produced ultra-lightweight aluminum-magnesium alloy bicycles using ornate cast-aluminum lugs and other components he designed, continuously improving and refining those designs until retirement a scant twenty years before the 1970s Bike Boom. Real shame only a few die-hards and YoYo the Clown seem to remember.
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A Frenchman named Louis Moire was working as a bicycle salesman not long before World War Two. An astute observer of commerce, Moire surveyed the commercial landscape of his chosen field and decided what its customers needed were affordable cyclotouring bicycles - something capable of competing with constructeurs like Maury and Pitard, just less on quality and more on price. Something giving the customer more "boum!" for the franc. A bargain, in other words.
Never one for disregarding marketing, Moire named his company "Goëland," French for "seagull," a pleasant, inviting image for a bike assembled and sold at 44 Rue Etienne Marcel in Paris, imminently landlocked and hours from the nearest seashore. But the bicycles that came out of his little shop were perhaps more special than anyone accustomed to the contemporary purchasing experience of mainstream bicycles might ever expect.
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