Originally Posted by beng1

I collect old hand tools and have done a lot of research on the early industrial era. I doubt there was a lot of variety in metal tubing until the late 1800s. I had an 1899 Pierce bicycle which had thin-wall carbon steel tubes of a very high quality and it was a very light bike, but it was an exception and not a rule. Most of the steel in the USA came from England until in the mid 1800s the USA started to get steel mills. On a lot of old USA tools you will see them marked "London Spring Steel". The first USA hand-saw manufacturer to get it's own steel mill, and thus the ability to undercut the prices of all it's competitors, was Disston in Pennsylvania, and it quickly put most other saw manufacturers out of business by 1900 because of it and became the largest saw manufacturer on Earth through WWII.

I imagine in the earliest days of bicycle manufacture, with the small choice of metal tubing there was, a lot of the same quality and type of tubing was used for a very wide variety of manufactured items.

I realize that "gaspipe" bike is just a figure of speech, but I wanted to make people aware that the mass-produced department store bicycles made in the USA in the 1970s and earlier, which had butt-welded or brazed frames with no lugs, are a LOT closer to being like real gas pipe than any of the lugged frame bikes, or the tig-welded chromoly mountain-bikes and other bikes.