The Bearings, Vol 11, No 17
Articles in this issue
- John S. Johnson is expelled from the League of American Wheelmen for selling a prize wheel; trainer Thomas Eck is suspended one year for extorting money from race promoters. The Bearings correspondent interviews Chairman Gideon in Philadelphia on the night the verdict is reached.
- Arthur Gardiner sweeps all Class B events on the southern circuit at Memphis and Nashville, including the mile invitation (2:26) and two-mile handicap at Nashville; Gus Steele and Frank Barnett run second and third repeatedly but cannot match Gardiner's pace.
- George N. Adams of Jacksonville, Fla., riding a Stearns and paced by Ganse and Webber, wins the sanctioned southern championship mile in Charlotte, N.C., in 2:37.
- Walter Sanger writes from Louisville signaling he may follow Johnson into the professional ranks if A.G. Spalding permits it; Wisconsin state notes cover Milwaukee County road tax figures, a new triangular circuit at Madison, Monroe, and Beloit, and several local road race results.
- Mike Dirnberger and the Spalding team of Sanger, Titus, and Cabanne post impressive practice times at Fountain Ferry track, with Sanger's final mile in 2:17; Louisville officials plan to lobby Chairman Gideon to shift the Springfield national circuit dates to coincide with the G.A.R. encampment of 250,000 visitors.
- Editorial addresses Johnson's expulsion with sardonic advice: rather than flee to France, Johnson and Eck should rally the racing men to turn professional honestly and create genuine professional competition in America.
- Editorial supports rational cycling costume for women but scathingly criticizes an immodest, physically unattractive member of the Knickerbocker Club who parades on Chicago streets and embarrassed the Chicago Cycling Club at its ladies' night.
- Editorial warns readers the book being made on the Chicago road race is a mathematical cinch against bettors — the Associated Cycling Clubs have condemned it — and the bookmakers' percentage on any outcome is enormous.
- Chicago attorney John H. Breckenridge sues the Galena Trust & Safety Vault Co., owners of the Fort Dearborn Building, for $25,000 after being refused permission to take his bicycle into the building, testing the legal rights of office tenants.
- Paris correspondent covers two meetings: Banker loses to Vasseur in the 2,000-meter scratch at the Velodrome d'Est despite being favored; Barden sets new world records for 1–11 km at Bordeaux paced by six triplets; Houben wins a disputed match against Robertson at Brussels after Robertson suffers a bad fall.
- San Francisco correspondent reports on the city's notoriously bad streets, the Southern Pacific railroad's hostility to cyclists, and the alliance between the Merchants Association and 15,000 local wheelmen fighting for an ordinance governing wagon-tire widths; Frank Byrne of the Imperial Cycling Club breaks the coast five-mile road record in 12:13.
- St. Louis Pastime Athletic Club's new president Will Brown threatens to quit after discovering debts exceed assets and the club's costly De Hodiamont track lost over $2,000 last year; the piece also recounts the farcical rise and fall of Joseph Bressler's rival 'Knights of the Wheel' organization formed after his L.A.W. expulsion.
- Chairman Gideon transfers four Syracuse riders — Fred Fisher, Fred Fellows, Fred List, and J. Fred Barry (the 'Four Freds') — to Class B for receiving manufacturer advertising; the Kirk Park matinee races also feature the first flying-start competition under L.A.W. rules, introduced by Tom Eck.
- Massachusetts Division plans an elaborate May 30 meet at Waltham with Zimmerman secured for an exhibition paced mile, Bald and the Columbia team making their first eastern appearance, and gold-medal prizes at actual face value.
- Sharpsburg Wheelmen annual road race on the Butler plank road near Pittsburgh; Louis Gimm of Cleveland finishes seventeenth, and scratch men Goble and T.R. Eddy of Columbus lose the time prize by fighting over who should set the pace.
- London correspondent covers the Brixton Club meeting at Herne Hill, where F. Burnand beats Fred May to win the Brixton silver challenge cup in the ten-mile open before 6,000 spectators; the meeting also features the first race for unlicensed amateur riders, with F. Osborn winning the half-mile scratch in 1:11.
- Port Huron Athletic Club completes a new solid-cement quarter-mile track, thirty feet wide at the tape with turns banked six feet, expected to be the fastest in the north-central states; a ten-event Decoration Day meet with seven open Class A races is planned.
- The Veloz Club Potosino holds a successful first race meet in San Luis Potosi on May 5; J.B. Woodward wins the two- and four-kilometer races, and fifteen-year-old Arturo Gomez shows great promise.
- Buffalo Press C.C. announces a Fourth of July meet featuring a $650 piano as first prize in the one-mile Class B race, specifically designed to bring Eddie Bald and Mike Dirnberger together for their first head-to-head contest.
- 137 entries received for the Decoration Day Irvington-Milburn road race in New Jersey with only three Class B riders; New York notes cover the Brooklyn Good Roads Association rally, President Howell's plan to remove the Brooklyn Bridge toll for cyclists, Charlie Murphy's Decoration Day plans, and a contentious public hearing on the Croton Aqueduct cycle path.
- The Waldo Park road race is expected to draw 100–125 entries including a St. Louis contingent led by E.A. Grath and the Coburn brothers; the new Y.M.C.A. quarter-mile track is being readied for a formal June opening.
- Cadillac Cycle Club eight-mile handicap road race won by Paul Gilbert with C.E. Proudfoot taking time prize in 22:45; F.B. Rigby, paced by the tandem team of Bernhart and Goetz, will attempt Ohio's Class B mile record of 1:59 at the Decoration Day C.W.C. meet.
- Humorous fiction about a fat, mercurial newspaper reporter who storms into his editor friend's office threatening to quit after being berated by his chief, only to be talked out of it with sardonic wisdom; accompanied by the comic cycling verse 'Pump.'
- Tall-tale presented to the Racing Cyclists Liars Club: the narrator claims to have placed his bicycle on the rails ahead of a New York Central express along the Hudson near Yonkers, was lifted into the air by the locomotive's speed, and found unconscious behind the last coach having covered 5.25 miles in 4:30.
- Fritz Lacey of Los Angeles lowers the 25-mile competition record held by L.S. Meintjes since Chicago in August 1894, finishing in 1:03:06, with Emil Ulbricht second.
- Technical article describes a French inventor's compensating device — a ball-bearing idle sprocket at a fixed point in the chain run — that prevents chain-jumping on elliptical chainwheels by automatically tensioning the chain at dead-center pedal positions, with mathematical analysis of the negligible friction added.
- A Bearings reporter visits C.E. Jenkins's crowded factory at 20 Custom House Place, Chicago; the Napoleon bicycle (19-lb. roadster) is selling so fast that 50 men working all day cannot keep up with 500 orders received since the firm opened two months ago.
- Formation of the New York Cycle Board of Trade is detailed: membership open to dealers and branch managers, $5 entrance fee and $12 annual dues, standing committees on membership, highways, and dealers' protection, with the secretary charged to maintain a register of delinquent customers and stolen wheels.
- Philadelphia trade report: wheel scarcity is so extreme that dealers have sold their trial machines and countermanded orders are increasing, with tandems especially impossible to obtain; John Backus, Zimmerman's former trainer known as the 'Dark Secret,' has joined Weise & Bowen to sell the Stearns.
- London trade correspondent reports Coventry factories working overtime, the Eadie Mfg. Co. overwhelmed with parts orders, the Scottish Pneumatic Tire Co. incorporated at £60,000, and industry anticipation over the Rudge wrongful-dismissal lawsuit expected to produce surprising revelations.
- New York trade survey: Gormully & Jeffery's Brooklyn riding school gives 300–400 lessons daily under 16 instructors; the Metropolitan Bicycling Academy attracts celebrity clients including Lillian Russell, Richard Mansfield, and Gen. Nelson Miles; several new academies and dealers described.
- The Merwin saddle brake, made from Bessemer steel and clamped invisibly under the saddle springs, applies pressure directly to the rear tire when the rider pushes back in the saddle; it adjusts for saddle height and sells for $2 from J.C. Merwin & Co. of Brooklyn.
- Heavy American advance orders for 1895 have overwhelmed English weldless steel tube makers; discounts off list prices have collapsed to near zero, cycle makers unable to secure tubing face sharply higher prices, and the famine is expected to worsen into 1896.
- Survey of Louisville's principal cycle dealers profiles G.M. Allison (Columbia), Prince Wells (Rambler), Jefferis Bros. (Victor), Martin & Dressing (Munger), R.C. Whayne Mfg. Co. (Southern with patented foot-brake and lamp-bracket), Kentucky Cycle Co. (Stearns), and the Dow Wire Works (Orient, Imperial, Grayhound).
- Brief trade news from over a dozen cities: Stoddard Sulky Co. of Syracuse prepares to make pneumatic tires, the Randolph-Heckel Hardware Co. incorporates in St. Louis with $75,000 capital, and the Eddy Mfg. Co. in Greenfield, Mass., prepares to manufacture bicycles from a new model.
- A $1 million stock company is formed in Minneapolis to manufacture the Minnehaha bicycle, with $15,000 already paid in and Frank Heywood elected president; the plant will target the northwest market exclusively with strictly high-grade machines.