The Bearings, Vol 8, No 18
Articles in this issue
- The LAW Racing Board, meeting at Cleveland's Hollenden hotel, votes to recommend Class A (pure amateurs, prizes capped at $50) and Class B (manufacturer-sponsored riders, unlimited prizes) for 1894, while unanimously rejecting all horse-paced records made by Johnson, Bliss, and Dirnberger as 'foreign to cycling.'
- Persistent rain ruins the West End track and prevents Dirnberger and Bliss from breaking further records at Nashville; the Rambler team's mascot, a golden retriever named Pansy wearing a maroon velvet blanket, keeps spirits up during idle days, while the bored racing men chase pigs and chalk 'Rambler' on them.
- London correspondent C. W. Hartung reports on the 17th Stanley Show opening at Agricultural Hall, Islington—preceded by a champagne luncheon and the Stanley Club dinner for 140 at the Hotel Metropole—and notes that A. V. Linton abandoned a 100-mile safety record attempt at 95 miles, F. J. Osmond is to marry in December, and W. S. Holding is convalescing from a lung illness.
- John Wilkinson of Syracuse, four-time Central New York champion, lowered the round-trip road record from Syracuse to Utica (112 hilly miles) from 9:05:00 to 8:39:00 without prior road training, riding a twenty-pound Stearns racer and covering over eighty miles alone.
- Baltimore's newly elected Alderman Depkin drafted a sweeping anti-cycling ordinance—requiring bells, slow speeds, and distance from car tracks—but after Chief Consul Mott recounted how wheelmen had once elected a city councilman from Depkin's own ward, the final ordinance merely forbade coasting, with a $2–$5 fine.
- Comedian Eddie Foy, performing 'Sinbad' in St. Louis, confused his throat-wash with a bottle of ammonia and silver-nitrate solution he used to clean his bicycle; after swallowing a dose he struggled through the performance with restoratives from a drug store and is now under a doctor's care.
- English cycling paper 'The Scorcher in Wheeling' treats as a joke the report that an independent-party committee asked champion A. A. Zimmerman to stand for sheriff of Monmouth County, N. J., musing that a man who has broken so many records would be excellent at putting 'brokers' in.
- The Cleveland Wheel Club launches indoor football with rubber sandals on its 48-by-80-foot ballroom floor, a billiard tournament, and monthly dancing parties; cycle dealers Taylor & Packer dissolve their Euclid Avenue partnership; and Lakeside flyers E. C. Johnson and Art Brown decline invitations to pace Bliss and Dirnberger at Nashville.
- British cyclist M. A. Holbein has suffered relentless bad luck: a thunderstorm ruined his 12- and 24-hour tricycle record attempts at Skegness, a knee injury laid him up, and on two separate outings pacing tandems collapsed and threw him, leaving him with severely injured chest bones under medical treatment.
- A new Parisian indoor cycle game called 'Velo-Poule' is described: a single rider at a time navigates a 21-foot-square cord-bounded track on a safety bicycle, knocking down eight numbered rubber red pins in sequence without touching the eight black pins or crossing the boundary.
- The editors endorse the Racing Board's Class A/B recommendation as a vast improvement over the discredited old amateur rule, noting that while Class B—which allows manufacturers to pay salaries and unlimited prize values—looks bad in cold type, it is far preferable to the 'bastard system' of the past season, and expect the National Assembly to adopt it.
- The Racing Board's refusal to ratify horse-paced records strips Johnson of his mile record and Bliss and Dirnberger of shorter-distance marks, leaving Tyler and Windle as flying- and standing-mile champions; the editors agree with the decision on purity grounds but argue horse-paced marks deserve separate recognition since multi-cycle pacemaking has now reached the limits of human speed.
- The regular miscellany department includes: a hoosier wheelman who is baptized in a country creek after volunteering to take a frightened girl's place ('Days of Chivalry'); Colonel Pope's son Alfred who tells his father 'Work! What should I ever work for. I have a strong father'; and racers at the Trocadero discovering that Sousa's 'Washington Post March' is the greatest pacemaker ever invented.
- Profile of Ohio trick rider Sid C. Black, who attempted to circumnavigate the world on an ordinary bicycle giving exhibitions for income, settled in Salt Lake City after six weeks, and now represents H. A. Lozier & Co. on the road, demonstrating the wheel's strength by riding over curbstones and performing crowd-pleasing stunts.
- Boston cycling clubs are mounting winter entertainments including a much-anticipated Thanksgiving Day football match between the Press and Cambridgeport clubs; the A. C. C. billiard, pool, and whist tournament is well under way; a report from France describes a new arm-and-leg-powered 'lightning racer' already beaten by a novice at a New York meet.
- A satirical inventory of next season's cycling fashions: sweaters worn inside or out by temperature, a cowbell for beginners in place of the chrysanthemum for dudes, 'pneumatic calves' of rubber for pipe-stemmed riders, woollens washed every eight weeks, and railroads 'much used by persons making century runs.'
- A cycle dealer visited for a minor repair disparages every make the author mentions—condemning wheels for bronze hubs, tin rims, bad spokes, fraudulent pricing, and outright fraud—before the author's laughter forces him to back down and admit 'most any of 'em is pretty fair.'
- A hotel porter repeatedly orders a pipe-smoking man in knickerbockers to remove a bicycle from the Auditorium rotunda; when the man never responds the porter throws the machine into the street where a cab crushes it, only to learn the indifferent gentleman is Lord Snob of Snobton and the bicycle was never his.
- Columnist 'Bolav' rejects charges of cowardice from Kain of the Philadelphia paper and 'Senator Morgan' of Buffalo; restates his case that the Philadelphia show is a trade mistake no one outside G. & J. wants; warns that the bicycle price question remains unsettled and rumors of Pope-Gormully dinners hint at a dangerous combination against smaller makers.
- Reprinted from the Irish Cyclist via Wheeling, this defense of fast riding argues that 'scorching' is relative—a rider doing seventeen miles who is capable of twenty is actually taking it easy—and that 'arm-chair' cycling journalists who peak at ten miles an hour misjudge every faster rider as a reckless fool.
- 'Nibs' notes that a hotel porter's bicycle is lighter and costlier than the proprietor's sixty-pound relic, reflects on the irony that poorer workers often ride the best modern wheels, and describes how employers exploit clerks' personal bicycles for firm errands, threatening dismissal if refused.
- Frank Lenz, interviewed in Madras during his round-the-world bicycle tour, describes being pelted with sandals and hunted by mobs in Hu-peh province shouting 'Kill the foreign devil!'; he fled three miles at full speed before the crowd caught him, took his bicycle, and attacked him with rakes and hoes; in total he covered 2,884 miles through China, about 1,800 of them on foot with coolies carrying the machine.
- 'Ar Jay,' writing in the Irish Cyclist, recalls his first ride on a borrowed 54-inch Coventry Machinists' ordinary at Portora Royal School in 1878: heading toward a landing on Loch Erne, his bootlace wound into the pedal, the back wheel rose, and he ended prone on the road with one foot firmly tied to the machine.
- St. Louis is to get a new cycling weekly called 'Cycling Echoes,' edited by John H. Ritchie with W. R. Wright as business manager; early preparations begin for the Forest Park road race; and Fred Beach of Muscatine wins the Iowa LAW chief consulship, defeating A. A. Herring of Sioux City 243 to 43.
- A Toledo correspondent muses on a Conan Doyle reference to an 'unbreakable tire,' then recounts a city councilman who told him cyclists have no legal right on the streets; he argues that a voluntary bicycle tax—recently levied in Toledo—is the quickest path to universal recognition of the wheel as a vehicle.
- Milwaukee: Gus Simmerling of the Mercury Club organizes an Association of Cycling Clubs (first meeting December 7) to stop rival clubs from scheduling opposition races and mistreating the public; professional bicycle thief Mike Altweger, who stole two wheels from the Pabst building, is sentenced to nine months in the house of correction within eighteen hours of arrest.
- The paper reprints Henry Sturmey of The Cyclist on preparing for cycle shows: all machines should be in position with descriptive cards by 10 a.m. Friday; path racers should be set low and back, full roadsters high and forward with lamps, bells, tool-bags, and pumps attached—not all identically adjusted as is the common lazy practice.
- British champion F. J. Osmond, transformed by his American visit, tells The Wheeler that American clubs give promising riders far more support than English clubs do, the Springfield track is the fastest he has ever seen, American roads outside Boston are simply unridable, and English cycles are decidedly superior in design though American makers can turn out capital machines.
- South African champion L. S. Meintjes describes his training regime in a syndicate article: a first month of ten-to-twenty-mile slow spins combined with daily walking to build wind and loosen muscles, then a second month of graduated quarter-and-half-mile sprints, after which race competition alone keeps a man on edge—provided he avoids pastry, liquor, and draughts.
- McKee & Harrington secretary E. T. Irving accidentally boards an express train at Lyndhurst, finds himself locked on the front platform behind the tender, is pelted by cinders and drenched by overflow from the water troughs in near-zero temperatures at sixty miles an hour, and is carried fifty miles past Passaic before he can alight.
- The Wilson tariff bill proposes a 35% ad valorem duty on bicycles, down from 45%, but the editors argue the reduction will do little to help importers since at projected 1894 list prices of $135 the duty remains effectively prohibitive, and American makers need not worry as long as general national prosperity holds.
- The Fairbanks Wood Rim Co., backed by a wealthy syndicate with a Boston plant aiming at 300 pairs per day, announces it will sue all infringers of its built-up rim patent in England and France as well as the U.S.; Overman's Victors will list at $125 for 1894; the Derby Cycle Co. runs full force producing 2,500 wheels fitted with C. F. Pease's new detachable clincher tire, which the company claims will not blow off, puncture, creep, or explode.
- W. W. Stall of the Boston Wood Rim Co. describes newly patented rims manufactured under two tons of pressure from thick stock, producing a thickened outer ply that allows the tire groove to be cut in solid wood—eliminating joints near thin edges and combining the strength of built-up and solid construction with a nearly invisible cement seam.
- The Sercombe-Bolte Mfg. Co. stock is to be auctioned in Milwaukee on December 20; creditors railroad man John S. George and shipbuilder W. H. Wolf, who hold a $21,000 judgment note, will bid it in and restart under a new name with G. Pingree as manager, cutting out both P. H. Sercombe and F. H. Bolte; separately, the Providence Tire Co. has been organized in Providence, R.I., with $100,000 capital and plans to show a surprising tire at the New York show.
- 'Traveler' visits the Indiana Bicycle Co. in Indianapolis and declares the 28.5-pound '94 Waverley the finest bicycle he has ever seen—equal in every point to old-line high-grade machines—predicting it will cause a greater stir next season than its debut at $100 did this year.
- Extended London report on the 17th Stanley Show at Agricultural Hall, Islington: roughly 350 exhibitors and 1,400 machines fill the hall; ladies' safeties and tandem bicycles are prominent growth areas; the Palmer single-tube flax tire is rapidly challenging Dunlop (which needs no stand since 75% of machines already carry it); the boycott among tire makers has 'utterly failed'; and Doig's pneumatic hub attracts wide attention.
- An eastern dealer's complaint about warranty costs prompts an editorial: when riders return broken wheels, dealers bear repair labor and shipping while customers grow impatient and defect to rival makes, costing dealers hundreds of dollars a year; The Bearings disagrees with his call for a two-month guarantee only, arguing that coverage should extend through the full riding season.