My first bicycle was not, in fact, a bicycle. I rode it in 1968, when I was two years old and as tubby as a bear cub. It had four wheels, not two, and no pedals: strictly speaking, it was a scooter.

When Richard Burke and Bevil Hogg founded Trek Bicycles out of a barn in Waterloo, Wisconsin in 1976, they weren't dreaming of one day outsourcing their manufacturing to Asia. Instead, armed with high ...