Official Bulletin and Scrap Book of the League of American Wheelmen, Vol 18, No 12
Articles in this issue
- Reprints a Boston Herald item noting the bicycle's renewed popularity as a $50 alternative to the costly automobile, spurred by smooth "black roads," higher trolley fares and the housing scarcity, with industrial workers wheeling home for dinner; Bassett adds a wish for the return of the old bicycle club and its good fellowship.
- Announces the annual meeting of old-time New York cycle riders at the Crescent Athletic Club of Brooklyn on December 4th, where Wm. H. Hale will exhibit a hundred new lantern slides made from views taken at the 1920 Wheel About the Hub and Adirondack Trip tours.
- The Bulletin's Christmas story, in which Alton, motoring with Alicia over the white roads, proposes settling his marriage proposal by the toss of a copper cent that proves to be "heads" on both sides.
- At the Hartford Wheel Club's summer run, Henry Goodman recalls inflating the first pneumatic-tired bicycle brought to the Pope company in Hartford in 1882 using hydraulic pressure at the Hartford Machine Screw company, after which both tires exploded loudly enough to scare employees from the building.
- An English writer traces the word "bike" to costers of the early nineties; the Cyclists' Touring Club fought it until 1896, when titled folk filled the West End parks on Humbers and Swifts and called their mounts "bikes," making the term respectable dictionary English.
- Reports the annual shareholders' meeting of the Hendee Manufacturing Company on October 27, electing Henry H. Skinner president, William E. Gilbert vice-president, the Weschler brothers and Lindley D. Hubbell among the officers, and an eight-member board of directors.
- "Cannon Ball" Baker lowers the "three-flag" record from Mexico to Canada, covering the 1694 miles in an elapsed time of two days, four hours and 41 minutes; the column also notes Otis Chamberlin of Cambridge claiming to be America's oldest rider against older L.A.W. men Chas. W. Reed (79) and W. S. Dimmock (83).
- An 1884 cycling chronology covering Samuel Conant Foster's prize-winning "Poems of Bicycling," Chicago and Boston club races, Henry Ward Beecher riding a tricycle at Peekskill, three St. Louis wheelmen coasting Mt. Washington, and the Niagara-to-Boston tour commanded by Burley B. Ayers.
- Reprints a letter from J. B. Dunlop to the Irish Cyclist correcting George Baine's claim that wood rims were first used with the Dunlop tyre, recounting the concave mild-steel rims made by Mr. Edlin and the laminated Fairbanks wood rim later imported from Stall & Fairbanks of Bedford, Mass.