Originally Posted by
70sSanO
I bought my first "real" bike in 1986. I was a blue SR400 with Suntour Cyclone, Sugino cranks, Dia Compe brakes and Miche hubs. I rode that for a few years and made a few upgrades, but I never really liked the steering.
Around 1990 a bike shop was blowing out all the old style Cannondales and I bought a new white 1988 Cannondale Criterium for $100 with a steel (CroMo?) fork. It doesn't have any serial numbers and I think it was part of the Klein lawsuit. I could be wrong but, I vaguely recall Klein got $5 a frame settlement for every frame Cannondale sold. Cannondale had won every part of the lawsuit except the rear stays. As a result, they were coming out with their new cantilever dropouts so I got the old style cheap, which was a windfall for me…[the] bike is still phenomenal. For all of the talk about the harsh ride, I never really experienced it. Riding in SoCal does help with smoother roads. I have ridden my brother’s steel frame bikes and I may get one someday (my mtb’s are steel), but even at 63 I am not quite there yet.
John
Where does this stuff come from?
Not true. Not sure where you heard that or if you're just trying to craft a narrative that fits a sale at a LBS you experienced. It just is NOT true. Cannondale
WON the lawsuit on "prior art" and the rule of law kind of failed, but not for the reasons people think. Gary Klein never should have been given the patents because oversized aluminum tubing wasn't his innovation. From that independent activity period group at MIT it was a different student that innovated the oversized aluminum tubing, Klein's approach was small aluminum tubes. Gary took the other student's idea/approach and tried to patent the other student's innovation himself. This came out in the litigation. You can find a fiery rant from that original student in some old listserv email transcripts. He vented on Gary Klein and was very hostile to him as the litigation played out. Many of the Klein claims were repudiated by this other gentleman's correcting of the record. Cannondale was also able to prove both from their aluminum production of backpack frames and their experimenting with sailboat masts, and their own research and production how they had arrived at their aluminum frames. Cannondale was also first to market, don't forget.
Klein was trying to enforce a patent for an innovation that wasn't his, for a product that followed Cannondale to market. Cannondale was in full scale production when Klein was still goofing around doing only a handful of custom frames. Klein didn't have any meaningful production until long after Cannondale had exploded from a backpack, tent, sleeping bag, and bicycle touring accessories company into the force of nature that changed the paradigm away from steel, forever.
and in case anyone is wondering Roger Durham (of Bullseye hubs fame) was established as having built oversized aluminum frames before Klein. Bill Shook of American Classic built an oversized aluminum frame and was racing on it. Heck, even Sheldon Brown's wife built an oversized aluminum frame before Gary Klein. That's not really fair because she was in that famous MIT IAP bike group, and her actual bike from that IAP actually got dragged into the Cannondale/Klein litigation. The point being that in that group others figured out the oversized part, and Gary didn't. Per her website it sat in a cellar in France for 13 years, only to be dragged back across the pond to help invalidate the Klein claims. Then it hung in the Brown/Fell household on the wall, and in 2005 Sheldon built it up of road. The famous Fell on Fell image of her riding the '74 MIT IAP aluminum frame she built. Its fun to think about how brilliant she was and what a work of art bike she built out of aluminum all the way back in '74. The reason that is funny is that Sheldon used to build homemade contraptions trying to weld together two bikes to make tandems out of steel, when the whole time the real genius frame builder in the family was across town teaching mathematics and computer science at Northwestern, "yes, Sheldon you built a very…interesting bicycle. Umm, shouldn't those tubes at the bottom of the tandem be joined?" The famous "Fell on Fell" image of the bike she built in '74:
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/fell/ima...FellOnFell.jpg
Klein made great bikes, but the issue of primacy will haunt his legacy forever. Much like Newton's behavior in the Newton/Leibniz affair, Klein takes that role in the Klein v Cannondale (and everyone else who did it before Klein as well, and publicly). Klein would have a much better reputation in the cycling community (his bikes were phenomenal, the best bicycles ever made, imo) if he hadn't tried to ultimately patent the innovations of others that he copied their work from, and whose works had been publicly known.
I don't think the lesson of the IAP was to teach young engineers about testing the limits of "first to file." As others have said, Klein can't patent something that others did and did first, and publicly. Well he can file and get the patent, but as history proved, he can't enforce it and litigation will leave his with a tarnished reputation as to his claims of primacy in the development of oversized tubing on aluminum bicycles.
Sordid affair, the whole thing.
Two things people still believe:
1. Cannondale ripped off the Klein "patents"
2. Cannodales ride "harsh"
Heck, even Sheldon rode and loved steel bikes and his own wife was a founding member of the OS aluminum frame building club. We believe what we want to believe at times, I guess.