The story
Founded by Gary Klein in 1975.1
Gary Klein, born (1952-06-09) June 9, 1952, attended the University of California at Davis before transferring to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). During the Independent Activities Period in 1973, a group of students including Klein worked together under Professor Buckley to produce an aluminum framed bicycle. After analyzing a number of contemporary steel frames, and examining ones that had broken in use, they were able to determine the stresses placed on a bicycle frame. Faced with limited available types of aluminum alloy tubing, the students chose to construct frames from 6061 aluminium alloy seamless drawn tube; alternatives such as the stronger 7075 aluminum alloy were discarded because of the tubing dimensions.
After graduating from MIT in 1974 with a degree in chemical engineering, Klein took a business course for entrepreneurs. As a keen road racer, in 1975, he started a business project with three other people and built a limited run of aluminum alloy framed bikes at the MIT Innovation Center, using a US$20,000
(equivalent to $120,000 in 2025) grant provided by MIT and US$1,000 of capital from each partner. The prototypes, with larger diameter tubes and thinner walls than those produced in 1973, were displayed at the International cycle show in New York in February 1975.
The next year, he relocated to some disused buildings on his parents' farm in San Martin, California, that had previously been used for dehydrating prunes. In 1977, he patented use of large diameter aluminum alloy tubes to increase stiffness, and in 1980, he moved from San Jose, California, to Chehalis, Washington. He started production runs of road bicycles in the early 1980s and mountain bikes in the mid-1980s.
In the formative beginnings of the Klein Bicycle Corporation, the company began building bicycles out of a barn in Mary's Corner, a small community south of Chehalis, starting in 1981. The company opened a 14,000 square feet (1,300 m2) factory plant in the town that was expanded to 70,000 square feet (6,500 m2).
In 1995, Trek bought Klein bikes, after Klein found it hard to compete without the sales network of a larger company in place. At its peak, around 250 people worked at the Chehalis plant, but operations gradually moved to the main Trek factory in Wisconsin. In 2001, a workforce of around 70 people produced 15,000 to 20,000 frames a year. In 2002, all production moved to the Trek headquarters at Waterloo, Wisconsin and the Mary's Corner manufacturing site closed that same year. Bikes were still sold under the Klein name until around 2009 in Japan, but widespread distribution ceased circa 2007 in the United States.
From Wikipedia’s article on Klein Bicycle Corporation, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3