The Bicycling World, Vol 4, No 20
Articles in this issue
- Leader editorial predicting that the tricycle will outnumber the bicycle three to one within a few years, urging English makers to ship three-wheelers to America now since no American tricycle yet exists — the Pope Manufacturing Company having spent its energies on an improved bicycle, with only a rumour of a Mr. Overman's invention in Connecticut. A following unheaded note reflects on how forks, umbrellas and coal were once ridiculed before winning public favour.
- Club fixtures and reports: the Boston Bicycle Club's Fast Day race meeting (6 April) and the Rochester exhibition head the calendar, followed by news that St. Catharines (Ont.) bicyclers formed a club on 12 February under Captain S. Carman, the Montreal Bicycle Club's fourth annual meeting chaired by H. S. Tibbs adopted a dark-blue uniform by-law, and the Charlotte (N.C.), Bremen, British Residents (Paris) and Orange Wanderers clubs report organisation and riding conditions.
- A comic four-stanza poem by W. J. B. Siders on the fate of the first poet of spring, who is dispatched by the wise editor and the printing-office foreman — with printers' puns on 'pied forms', the 'devil' and the 'hell-box' — before a 'stiff-hunter' steals the body away.
- Letters from Gloucester, Buffalo, Chicago, Dayton and Essex County: a Gloucester consul reports twenty-eight to thirty machines in town and endorses Mr. Dean's editorial urging visiting riders to call on L.A.W. consuls; a Buffalo writer profiles the fifty-eight-member Buffalo club (Charles Forbush's 3.17 mile at Lockport, Dr. Appleby's imported 'grasshopper'); 'Steno' of Chicago defends untrained amateur racing against 'Cyclos'; and letters back 'Ellsworth's' Newburyport idea of an Essex County association while 'One who joined at Newport' protests against a wholesale new League constitution.
- Road guide to Staten Island — an irregular right-angled triangle thirteen miles by five, nearly bisected by the Fresh Kill — recommending the seven-and-a-half-mile macadamized Shore Road from Mariner's Harbor to Fort Wadsworth, the Richmond and Clove roads, the view from Grymes hill, and the old Port Richmond tavern where Aaron Burr died. Signed 'B. Bugle'.
- Through the efforts of Mr. Fred Jenkins, editor of the Wheel, a three-story brown-stone at 4th Avenue and 62d Street has been secured as a New York cyclists' club-house, with machine storage, a library of English and American wheel journals, billiard and meeting rooms, and bachelor quarters, at $2.00 a month for members of subscribing clubs; the World urges clubs to pledge the fifty names needed.
- Circular from the Boston Bicycle Club committee (E. C. Hodges, J. S. Dean, Frank W. Weston) announcing the third bicycle race meeting at the Institute Fair Building on Fast Day, 6 April 1882, including a ten-mile professional race for which champion John S. Prince has entered and Prof. Rollinson is expected — failing other entries, the Harrison brothers will run Prince in relay for the purse.
- First instalment of a bicycle tour account by an Irish wheelman, describing one of the most enjoyable runs he ever completed — notable for the length of the journey and the varied beauties of the scenery. The narrator promises to show that Irish cycling roads offer far more than foreign readers might expect.
- League of American Wheelmen department: membership applications forwarded by corresponding secretary Kingman N. Putnam (a Cortlandt Wheelmen addition and unattached riders from Topeka, Chicago and Baltimore), new consuls for Ashland, Ohio and Newton, Mass., notice of the spring board meeting at the Metropolitan Hotel, New York on 27 March, and a circular from the committee on consuls (Hazlett, Hodges, Waring) on appointing League hotels at reduced rates.
- Reader queries: 'Marx' of Cleveland asks 'Sixty' of Chicago to describe the hub lamp and reflector arrangement that threw a strong light one hundred and fifty feet with no felloe-shadow, and 'Ontari' of London, Ontario asks whether the hard Atlantic beaches such as Old Orchard, Nantasket or Cape May are firm enough to ride at low tide, and which lamp makes night riding safe.
- Paragraph gossip column: Miss Ida Blackwell trains under Mr. Prince to meet Mlle. Armaindo in the Fast Day races; Armaindo rode 617 miles in six days at Armory Hall, St. Louis; A. E. Stone won the St. Louis amateur five-mile championship in 20m. 18s.; the Central Park case comes before Judge Lawrence on 24 March; the Stoneham club mourns William R. Barrett; and Richard Garvey of St. Louis takes the Columbia agency from the Pope Manufacturing Company.
- Review notes on the April Century Magazine — a Matthew Arnold frontispiece with a study by Andrew Lang, Madame Ragozin on 'Russian Jews and Gentiles', and the forthcoming Carlyle 'Irish Journal' — and a welcome for The Irish Republic, a new Boston weekly devoted to Irish-American news, politics and literature.
- John S. Prince, champion of America, replies to John Keen's communication about a proposed $5,000 race: if Keen really means business in coming to Boston next August, Prince will race him for nothing less than $1,000 over the same course, with the Bicycling World as stakeholder and referee.