Remembering Joe Montgomery: The Visionary Who Revolutionized Cycling

Joe Montgomery, who founded Cannondale and transformed the cycling industry with bikes built of lightweight aluminum instead of heavier steel, sometimes walked around the company’s headquarters in Connecticut jingling coins in his pocket when the mood needed lifting. “You know what that is?” he would say, Murray Washburn, Cannondale’s director of product marketing, recalled in an interview. “That’s change. Change is good. We like change.” It was an overt display of his philosophy of embracing innovation and dismissing the status quo. Mr. Montgomery died of complications of heart-related illness on Jan. 2 at his home in Vero Beach, Fla., his daughter, Lauren Edinger, said. He was 86. At Cannondale, which Mr. Montgomery founded in 1971 with three partners, he and his team of designers and engineers changed the build, weight and feel of upscale, high-tech bicycles. The company was among the first in the United States to mass-produce bikes with frames made of large-diameter aluminum tubes.