That particular story had its beginnings four decades earlier when Ignaz Schwinn, a German who emigrated to USA in 1891, teamed up with countryman Adolph Arnold (a meat packer by trade) to found Arnold, Schwinn & Co. They had their sights on the burgeoning bicycle business that was taking the US by storm at that point, and they achieved this aim quite spectacularly, building their own cycles and gobbling up other competitors along the way.
But the bicycle game soon lost its buoyancy, and Schwinn, the driving force in the company, reckoned that motorcycles were the way to go. Rather than starting a motorcycle manufacturing facility from scratch, Schwinn repeated his ploy of the bicycle days, and made a competitor and offer he couldn’t refuse. That competitor was Frederick Robie, the son of George T. Robie, yet another former German, who began the Excelsior Supply Company in Chicago in 1876, specialising in sewing machine parts. As time went by, Excelsior too moved into
