The Bicycling World, Vol 1, No 8
Articles in this issue
- Opening notes: C. K. Munroe, editor of Harper's Young People, heads the New York Bicycle Club; a fourteen-member club forms at the University of Rochester; Jack Easy may join the English touring party; Mr. Justice Stephen is praised; and an index to the defunct American Bicycling Journal is promised.
- Reports on two English court cases bearing on cyclists' road rights: Milner v. Durrani, in which a cart driver was held liable for damaging a bicycle, and the Queen v. England, an acquittal in a manslaughter case involving a collision with an elderly pedestrian.
- Continuation of the French touring narrative, describing a night at a village inn near La Chapelle-la-Reine disrupted by a local fete, encounters with cattle and dogs on the road, and the ride through Chateau-Landon to a passport scrape with the police at Montereau.
- A history and membership roll of the Worcester Bicycle Club, founded 9 April 1879 under Captain F. S. Pratt, recounting club runs to Boston and the Westboro' fair and the successful defence of member J. E. Brown in the McFarland vs. Brown milk-cart suit.
- Club news: officer elections at the Capital, New York, and San Francisco bicycle clubs, new clubs organized at Marlboro', Rochester, and Saratoga Springs (under Hugh L. Willoughby), the Essex club's change to seal-brown corduroy, and officer changes at Worcester and Yonkers.
- Racing news: the Philadelphia-New York bicycle tournament heats, A. Camacho's win over L. H. Johnson and S. B. Pomeroy in the Manhattan Athletic Club's mile handicap at Madison Square Garden, David Stanton's fifty-mile professional victory over Daniel Belard, and a seventeen-rider moonlight excursion to Macomb's Dam.
- A tabulation of the Essex Bicycle Club's 1879 race results with dates, venues, distances, and times, recording wins by L. H. Johnson, S. B. Pomeroy, W. P. Field, and H. W. Knight, including the amateur championship at Mott Haven.
- Letters from Detroit on the Detroit Bicycle Club's thirteen-rider New Year's Day meet, from Norfolk, Virginia, on riders barred from a shell turnpike, lantern and wheel-size queries from New Haven and Hamburg, N.Y., word from San Francisco that Governor George C. Perkins is an active club member, and a note from Ricardo D. Albertini.
- A letter from Louis Delapraz, president of the Geneva Bicycle Club, tracing Swiss velocipeding from the Veloce Club de Geneve of 1869 to the present 36-member club, with road races round the Lake of Geneva and a ten-day tour to Chambery, Grenoble, Valence, Vienne, and Lyons.
- Jack Easy's fifth letter praises 'A Wheel around the Hub' in Scribner's and its artists Redwood, Taber, and Church, denies being 'Old Easy', reviews the riding seasons of 1877-79, and advocates broad tires on vehicles of burden to preserve the roads.
- Comic verse by 'V. Erdict' on five young Brockton bicyclers fined for riding on the Sabbath after Mr. Fitzgibbons' horse took fright, and acquitted on appeal by a more sensible judge.
- Announcement that the planned English bicycle tour has been reversed: the party will mount at Liverpool and ride the Bath Road toward London, returning to Liverpool by the famous Ten o'clock Express.
- Editorial marking the fulfilment of the numbers promised to American Bicycling Journal subscribers, naming contributors including Frank W. Weston, Alfred D. Chandler, and A. S. Brownell, reporting issues of 3,500 copies, and hinting at a weekly issue and a change of name to 'Wheel and Arrow'.
- An editorial survey of the legal standing of cyclists on public roads in America and England, drawing on recent court decisions.
- Report of the National Archery Association's annual business meeting at the Palmer House, Chicago, with new dues and entrance-fee rules, expulsion of the Kokomo Archers, election of Henry C. Carver as president, and the grand annual meeting fixed for Buffalo in July 1880.
- A. S. Brownell answers 'Capt. Jack', defending American experiments and improvements in archery tackle and arguing from measured Beacon Park scores that target colors should be valued one to five instead of one to nine.
- Describes Will H. Thompson's Private Practice Club for archers, a mail-in York Round scoring society with four classes and cash prizes, and prints its full constitution and rules.
- A query from Orange, N.J., on why nickel-plating a bicycle costs $20-$35 in America against two or three pounds in England, and 'Ixion' answering a New York correspondent on the superior rigidity of hollow over solid forks.
- Notices of contemporary papers: the Boston Courier under G. P. Lathrop, the Christian Register, the Boston Sunday Herald, the New York World's 'College Chronicle' edited by Lyman H. Bagg, and the St. Mary's College Miscellany of Peckham, England.
- Humorous verses and squibs including 'Are You Ready?', 'A Cropper', a jest on the pig-skin suspension saddle, and an advertisement rhyme signed A. (A.) Pope.
- Foreign notes: bicycle clubs in Madrid and Lyons, London theatre burlesques and the parks-admission question, a six days' race planned at Agricultural Hall, Islington, riding totals of T. F. Barrett and H. R. Reynolds of Oxford University Bi. C., and the Athenian Bicycle Club at Gawler, Australia.
- 'Whele' argues that the awkward word 'bicycle' should give way to 'wheel', so riders become wheelers or wheelmen and the paper itself might be called The Wheel and Bow.
- 'A roundy-lay by D.': verses urging grave elder walkers to stop creeping along the sidewalks and take to the wheel like the young wheel-stalkers.
- Clippings from other papers, including 'Getting Meaner' from the Chicago Field on unanswered correspondence and a Boston Courier note on the Boston Bicycle Club's annual meeting and dinner at Vossler's.
- Reprinted from the N.Y. Sun: a moonlit thirteen-mile ride by five bicyclers including Wentworth Rollins, C. K. Munroe, and L. H. Johnson, with bugle calls along the Boulevard to Trinity Cemetery and a forbidden dash through Central Park ended by park guards.