Well here's some interesting reading;
http://www.fundinguniverse.com/compa...y-History.html
Assuming this is the same Barnes. The history starts in the 1600s and continues today.
Key Dates:
1857: Wallace Barnes acquires clockmaking shop in Bristol, Connecticut.
1922: Three businesses merge to form Associated Spring Co.
1946: Associated Spring begins trading shares publicly.
1963: Associated Spring is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
1976: Associated Spring is renamed Barnes Group Inc.
1995: Wallace Barnes resigns as last family member to head company.
1998: New CEO Edmund Carpenter sets company on acquisition path.
2004: Nine acquisitions in five years have added $370 million to annual sales.
Seems they made clocks and springs and cattle medicine and there's even a little bit about hoopskirt wire. Here's what it ways about the bikes;
"Despite economic turbulence at the time, he was able to get his creditors to back his foray into manufacturing bicycle wheels and related parts. The Barnes Company, as it had become known, cashed in on the bicycle fad and generated much needed profits in the late 1890s. That put the company in good financial shape going into the 1900s.
The fading bicycle boom was replaced in the early 1900s by the emerging automobile industry. Barnes benefited from strong demand for motorcar springs for valves, clutches, starters, suspensions, and hundreds of other items."
Would be kind of a bummer if those wheels replaced the Barnes origionals, assuming that this is one of those Barneses.
They still make springs for the automibile and aerospace industry.