Bassett's Scrap Book, Vol 7, No 4
Articles in this issue
- A four-stanza comic poem arguing it isn't cycling itself that wears a man out—not riding for record on the quarter-mile track or hill-climbing—but carrying coal up from the cellar, beating a dusty carpet, chopping wood, and walking the floor with a baby.
- Reprints from Harper's Weekly the account by Harry A. Franck, who travelled around the world afoot, of a village inn at La Charite, France, where the landlady recalled a Boston wheelman who had lodged there in 1882 while touring the world by bicycle; Bassett wonders whether the rider was I. B. Potter, since Thomas Stevens only left New York in September 1885.
- Reports that Highway Commissioner Horatio S. Earle has, over opposition from conservative members of the Michigan House of Representatives, secured passage of his highway bill raising Michigan's good-roads appropriation to $300,000 for the ensuing two years; the surrounding squibs note a stalled New York Police Department order for seventy bicycles that drew no bids, C. M. Fairchild's drive to bring lapsed members back into the Chicago League, and another Boston boy cyclist killed by an automobile.
- Continuing the magazine's 'Walking' series, cites two curious facts about pedestrians: a man is measurably shorter while walking briskly than at rest, shown with a horizontal rod touching the head, and no one can walk far in a straight line blindfolded because one side of the body always tends to outwalk the other.
- Describes the two Draisienne machines of Baron von Drais de Saverbrun held by the National Museum at Munich and argues that one Karl Kech added cranks and pedals around 1862, which would predate Pierre Lallement of Paris as inventor of the bicycle.
- A run of letters from old League of American Wheelmen members (E. W. B. and T. R. C. of Philadelphia, J. A. King, J. H. D., Fred Graves of Rochester, B. T. C. of Kentucky and C. H. G. of New York City) sending their renewals and endorsing A. G. Bachelder's call for a reunion in New York.
- A table comparing one-mile speed records for an electric locomotive (27 seconds, 1903), an automobile (28½ seconds, 1906), a steam locomotive, a motorcycle, running/pacing/trotting horses, and men skating, running and walking, remarking how close the electric locomotive and automobile records already are.
- An English inventor describes his 'Cycloplane', a divided canvas plane fitted to a bicycle to lift part of the weight off the tyres, claiming 600 miles of testing in all weathers during which the wind once lifted him off the road.
- A roster of League of American Wheelmen members who joined in 1888 and remain in good standing, listed by membership number, name, city and date (including A. G. Batchelder of Summit N.J., Frederick Law Olmsted of Brookline and Jacob A. King of New York City), with a correction that member No. 455, printed in the May issue, is Marion X. Chuse, not 'Chase.'
- Obituary of Joseph G. Dalton, who died May 27, an early Boston cyclist who got a bicycle from Timms & Lawford at the 1876 Centennial Exposition, rode 1,000 miles in 1877, authored the cycling verse collection 'Lyra Bicyclica', was long a member of the Boston Bicycle Club, and was about 84 at his death; only Alfred D. Chandler and B. P. Browne are credited with riding in Boston before him.
- A poem reflecting on life's inescapable burdens and small consolations; the same page also carries a comic limerick, reprinted from the Liverpool Post, about a Sawbridgeworth man jailed for throwing a flat iron.