The American Bicycling Journal, Vol 1, No 16
Articles in this issue
- Opening leader notes arguing that bicycling is now too firmly established to fear its dying, praising an early-morning spring ride, welcoming the proposed East Chester Park extension to Five Corners, Dorchester, and chiding the Detroit Free Press for still writing "velocipede".
- Numbered directory of the seventeen American and Canadian bicycle clubs then in existence — Boston, Suffolk, Bangor, San Francisco, Montreal, Massachusetts, Capital, Fitchburg, Buffalo, Salem, Worcester, Harvard, Essex, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Wanderers and Providence — giving each club's founding date, entrance fee, colours, badge, uniform, headquarters and officers.
- Full report of the races held on a surveyed half-mile of Huntington Avenue, Boston, on 4 July 1879 under a $210 City Government appropriation, with Chas. E. Pratt as chairman of judges: J. C. Sharp, Jr. won the half-mile, L. H. Johnson of the Essex Bi. C. the one mile, Thomas Harrison beat John W. Wilson in the open three-mile, and Holman took the half-mile slow race.
- Report of the hearing at Boston City Hall on 7 July before Chas. E. Pratt, at which the absent W. R. Pitman was ruled a professional for having ridden for money at Bangor, taught riding, and sold prizes, so that the second and third mile-race prizes passed to E. P. and C. S. Sharp.
- Club department covering the Boston Bicycle Club's first annual meeting and dinner at Vossler's, its committee on the "professional" definition and its projected cinder track; the Suffolk Club's Fast-day meet and new headquarters at 36 Charles Street; Chandler and Sharp's tour of England; H. S. Tibbs's win at the Montreal Lacrosse Club sports; W. D. Swan's win in the Harvard Athletic Association mile handicap; and the Essex Club's eight firsts in nine races.
- Notice that the Journal's purchasing agency, described in No. 15, remains in operation for riders living too far from dealers to buy machines and sundries for themselves.
- Three-verse song with chorus, set to the tune "Dearest Mae", celebrating the rider's "gallant steed" with its senseless nerves of burnished steel.
- Wentworth Rollins's account of his roughly 190-mile ride of 3-8 July 1879 from Fifty-ninth Street and Eighth Avenue up the Boulevard and the old King's Bridge road through Yonkers, Hastings, Tarrytown, Sing Sing, Poughkeepsie, Rhinebeck, Hudson, Kinderhook and Troy, with a road-by-road verdict on surfaces, grades and scenery.
- The first bicycle race on the Pacific Coast, held 22 February under the auspices of the Occident Cricket Club, in which R. Searle beat C. L. Barrett by barely two lengths over the mile in 3m 51 3-5s, with G. Loring Cunningham third and J. F. Purdy fourth on an over-large machine.
- Highly critical report of the races of 27 January run on a dangerous egg-shaped eight-lap indoor track between the fair stalls: J. C. Sharp of the Suffolk Club won the two-mile from W. H. Pierce after wrecking his machine on a post, H. M. Pope won the mile final after J. A. C. Wright was thrown and lodged a foul claim, and W. R. Pitman, protested as a professional, withdrew but rode a 3m 5s mile against time.
- Editorial apologising for the long delay in issuing No. 16, promising No. 17 within thirty days and the remaining numbers of Vol. 1 more rapidly, and appealing for subscribers and advertisers to end the loss made on every number.
- Editorial tracking the Scientific American's reversal, from doubting whether twenty miles could be covered more easily awheel than afoot to declaring the bicycle "an ever-saddled horse that eats nothing and requires no care".
- On the New York Athletic Club's disqualification of W. M. Wright, held to have ridden two advertised $600 match races against the English professional David Stanton in 1876 under the name "R. Butler of Kentucky", and the pressure now being exerted to reinstate him as an amateur.
- Prints the three-clause definition of professional and amateur riders written into the Boston Bicycle Club's by-laws, noting it agrees in effect with that of the English bicycle clubs.
- The Suffolk Bicycle Club's races at the Chestnut Hill Reservoirs on Saturday 10 May, for gold medals given by Amos A. Lawrence and silver medals from the club: Russell S. Codman won both the quarter-mile and the mile, and G. Tappan Francis the five-mile.
- Reprinted from the San Francisco Chronicle of 29 November 1878: eleven riders invited by Loring Cunningham rode from the old toll-gate to the Cliff House in twenty minutes and over lunch organised themselves as the San Francisco Bicycle Club, with Cunningham president and W. G. Barrett secretary.
- Poem reprinted from the Transcript, signed "Greystone" of Newton Centre, April 1879, hailing the bicycle as an iron-backed courser harnessed to sunbeams.
- Account of the $500 "open to the world" race begun 14 May at the American Institute Building, New York, on a chalk-marked asphalt track: William de Noielle won with 500 3-4 miles from Chas. H. de Noielle and W. Rutland, before few spectators and with W. E. Harding badly hurt in a collision.
- A hundred-mile match for three hundred dollars a side at the Highland House Belvidere, Cincinnati, on 17 April, in which Sam E. Adams of Washington C. H., Ohio, on a fifty-two inch wheel finished alone after John Robinson of Baltimore strained a wrist in a fall at the seventy-first mile.
- Letter from Walter D. Welford of Newcastle-on-Tyne congratulating the Journal and surveying the English season: the Metropolitan meet at Hampton Court, a dozen provincial meets, the fast-growing Bicycle Touring Club with its town consuls, a rumour that Keen is to marry, and novelties such as hollow forks, rims and spokes and Singer's heavily raked "Challenge".
- The Rev. W. F. Norris's speeches at the annual dinner of the Buckingham (Eng.) Bicycle Club, arguing that a healthy, manly pastime is close kin to Christianity, that Buckingham neglects recreation for its young men, and that the fourteen bicycle works in Coventry and twenty elsewhere pay capital wages.
- Rebuts a Herald rumour that James Gordon Bennett shipped twenty-five Columbia bicycles with the Arctic expedition, arguing the cold would make the steel brittle and joking that the reporter must have meant the Pope Manufacturing Co.'s "Leatherette".
- Edwin F. Brown of Evanston, Ill. and Harry Farwell of Chicago left on 30 June for a tour via Chicago, Kenosha, Milwaukee, Waukesha, Lacrosse and Appleton, astonishing farm workers who saw them apparently walking in the air above the fence lines.
- Prints the Boston Police Commissioners' order of 3 July 1879, signed by chairman Henry S. Russell, directing the Superintendent of Police to regulate bicycles by the same laws as ordinary vehicles as to speed and location.
- Letters department in which "Cas." endorses "Jack Easy's" warnings about inhospitable roadside inns and encloses a Bicycling Times proposal for a club-approved list of good houses, "Bibliomaniac" seeks a file of the English "Bicycle Riders' Magazine", "Sandy" spoofs a 55-minute Boston-to-Lowell run made with his machine in the baggage car, and a correspondent reports a nine-year-old riding thirty miles from Milton to Cohasset.
- Editorial note that the list of over two hundred and fifty riders printed in the last number has brought many corrections and additions, but has now outgrown the space the Journal can spare.
- Editorial replies to some thirty correspondents from Ohio, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Norfolk and San Francisco, covering the missing No. 12, the delayed annuals, special-order treadles, the poor time made in the 'Frisco race, and how frequently the Journal can afford to appear.