Look

Look traces its origin to Jean Beyl, an engineer who ran a rubber-manufacturing business and broke his leg in a 1948 skiing accident while wearing a rigid binding that failed to release. The injury pushed Beyl into the safety-binding business: in 1950 he patented the Look Nevada, a dual-pivot ski binding designed to release under impact, and the company he built around it became a fixture of French ski manufacturing through the 1960s with the follow-up Nevada II. The company, based in Nevers in central France, stayed in ski equipment for three decades. In 1983 businessman Bernard Tapie bought Look, and the following year the company pivoted into cycling, launching the first clipless bicycle pedal in 1984 -- the PP65, which let riders click in and release with a twist of the heel, borrowing the automatic-release logic directly from Look's own ski bindings rather than developing a new mechanism from scratch. The design displaced traditional toe-clip-and-strap pedals across professional and amateur road cycling within a few years. Look followed with the industry's first carbon-fiber bicycle frame in 1986, cementing its move from a ski-safety company into a cycling equipment maker, a transition few binding manufacturers of its era survived intact.