The story of how the Schwinn Sting-Ray came to be is much more interesting, and isn’t nearly as complicated – it’s not like anybody had to really do a lot of engineering or road-testing for a bicycle. In fact, the man who came up with the idea for them in the early 1960s, Albert Fritz, was a manager in Schwinn’s R&D department, having started there as a welder when he came home from WWII. He put two and two together when he learned that kids, particularly those in California, were home-modifying their existing traditional bicycles by removing extra bits and adding chopper-motorcycle parts like handlebars and long seats. Real motorcycles were very cool at the time, since muscle cars were still in their early stages, and young people who wanted those kinds of things did the best they could to have a kid-version of those grown-up toys. Fritz was an intelligent man, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Schwinn could do well selling people exactly that which they were busting their humps to create from scratch. Schwinn executives weren’t sure, but they took Fritz’s word for it, and ended up selling four times more Sting-Rays the first year of production (1963) than their best-selling traditional models – and they had to stop early because their tire supplier couldn’t keep up with demand. Schwinn made multiple versions of the Sting-Ray from 1963 to 1981, totaling many, many thousands, and their competitors made many, many more. Some say that the Sting-Ray helped pave the way for BMX bikes, but that’s a whole other story. #schwinnbikes #schwinnstingray #bicyclestories #bicyclehistory #madeinchicago #mychildhood #bicyclelife #schwinn #wheniwasakid (at Chicago, Illinois) https://www.instagram.com/p/CC_aX97hRa2/?igshid=1b6g13rqa89a9
