It is hard — no — it is impossible to imagine bicycle racing without steel tubing. After all, for nearly a century, steel was simply the main ingredient of any bike frame. And it is equally impossible to imagine steel bike frames without Columbus tubes, as the historic Italian manufacturer has been synonymous with so many of the great bikes that have won so many great races. This year, the company is celebrating its centennial, an unforgettable anniversary for any bike aficionado. We thought it only fitting to look back over the company’s rich heritage.
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Founded in 1919 on the heels of World War I, Italian industrialist Antonio Luigi Colombo did not set out to take over the sport of cycling. He simply wanted to make the best steel tubes on the market. While his tubes quickly found favor in the burgeoning sport of road racing, he was equally interested in selling his tubes to furniture makers or the aviation industry, which also was in its infancy. His steel tubes, in fact, quickly caught the eye of Marcel Breuer, a designer for the German Bauhaus. The revolutionary art school — also founded in 1919 — championed the integration of modern materials and forms into their design, and steel tubes became an integral part of his Cesca and Wassily chairs, both considered masterpieces of 20th-century furniture design.
Visiting the Columbus and Cinelli headquarters, one instantly enters a Mecca of living history. Mechanics are busy building up new carbon racing bikes for their Continental pro team, while in the other half of the factory, steel specialists are cutting tubesets to be sent out to steel frame builders around the world. But regardless of which side you are on, you are simply bathed in history. Vintage cycling images adorn the walls, while some of the coveted Bauhaus furniture is arranged on shelves perched above the factory.
When Antonio took over the company in the 1970’s he was primarily interested in the cycling side of the industry, and he took it to new heights. But the Bauhaus connection had clearly made its mark, and he was already collecting modern art. Art and cycling soon became synonymous with Colombo. “The Bauhaus was perhaps my main inspiration in my desire to mix art and the bike,” he says.
“They always seem to be evolving. They are always looking for improvements,” says Matthew Sowter, founder of Saffron Frameworks, an award-winning boutique British frame-builder, that works almost exclusively with Columbus. “I often ask myself why I use Columbus over any other tube provider I could choose between five or six different manufacturers, but the reason I work with Columbus is the quality of the tubes: it is always accurate. The butting profile, whatever, is always accurate. When I put in an order for a couple of hundred tubes, I know exactly what I am getting. And that is something I don’t find with the other tube manufacturers. We predominantly build in stainless steel and we use their XCR tubes a lot. I just feel that they are outstanding! I have never had a failure. The chrome content is high enough that there is never any corrosion, and it has a high enough tensile strength, which means that the wall thickness can really come down to a small diameter. It just means I get a super consistent tube.”
But while Columbus tubes have taken frame building to its highest levels in the past century, Colombo admits he is uncertain where cycling will go in the next century. “I would like to do more volume,” he admits. “And I see new areas for that. I am very interested in the rise of urban bikes, for example, as well as gravel, and travel. And I think there is still a lot to be done with safety and durability. We still don’t really know just how long a fork will last! We know about how many miles we can expect out of a car, but we don’t really know that about a bicycle. And you have your life on the bicycle. But some of this also depends on how the communities react in the future and what kind of space they make for cycling. More roads for bicycles means better bicycles. But it depends on the community reducing the number of cars. But one thing is clear for me. The future is the bicycle.”