The Bicycling World, Vol 43, No 13
Articles in this issue
- The Shelby Steel Tube Co. has been absorbed into the billion-dollar United States Steel Corporation on a stock basis — one U.S. Steel common share for five Shelby common, one for two Shelby preferred — with sales manager F. A. Brown foreshadowing "a new level of prices" and a merger with the National Tube Co.'s small-tubing department.
- Don B. Smith, manager of the Olive Wheel Co. of Syracuse, N. Y., and lately an investor in the Holley Motor Co. of Bradford, Pa., died on 19 June after a short illness and was buried at Bradford.
- President Priest of the Cycle Manufacturers' Association says the association will keep holding the National show indefinitely rather than leave the field to any private concern, so England will continue to have two shows.
- After the court forbade the Stearns Bicycle Agency to use the name "Stearns" on machines finished in orange, the Regal bicycle's nameplate will henceforth read Bretz Cycle Mfg. Co., the design otherwise unaltered.
- The Central Distributing Co. of Buffalo — a year-old pooling of the Excelsior Machine Co., the Steel Ball Co. of Chicago and Cleveland's Grant Ball Co. and Ball and Pedal Co. — has formally dissolved, the four steel-ball makers resuming independent trading.
- Swiss cycle imports fell to 4,080 hundredweights worth $548,000 in 1900 from 4,996 in 1899; Germany supplied 2,324 hundredweights, France 874, America only 424 and England 142.
- English cycle exports for May 1901 rose to £53,059, against the record low of £42,524 recorded in May 1900.
- Quotes the Mail Order Journal's June issue, in which mail-order houses style their customers "suckers" and themselves "the profesh," as proof that the mail-order bicycle belongs with gold bricks and green goods; the Mead Cycle Co.'s offer of a bicycle for distributing 1,000 catalogs is cited as a type of the name-gathering fake.
- Creditors of W. H. Marble of Brockton, Mass. — the largest being the Miami Cycle & Mfg. Co. of Middletown, O., Brown & Wales of Boston and the Hartford Rubber Works Co. — agreed to let him trade on, his $5,000 of assets being mostly good leases on wheels.
- In the Syracuse bankruptcy court the effort to make F. W. Gridley, formerly president of the Exchange National Bank, a party to the Dodge Bicycle Co. case ended when his own attorneys admitted his insolvency and withdrew their answer.
- Before Referee in Bankruptcy Stone at Syracuse it was agreed that Horace Dodge be declared bankrupt individually and as a member of the Dodge Cycle Co., without Gridley's name being associated in the case.
- Receiver F. A. Betts holds a $10,000 certified check from the Eisenhuth Horseless Vehicle Co. toward a $150,000 sale of the Keating Wheel and Automobile Co.'s Middletown plant; with C. D. Rood's $161,000 claim allowed, bondholders would take 80 per cent and general creditors nothing.
- Contracts are signed and work begun on a 100x35 brick building at East Bradford, Pa., for the Holley Motor Cycle Co., promoted by the local Board of Trade and expected to employ more than a hundred men.
- The Czar Cycle Co. has filed a bill in equity at Pittsburg, Pa., against H. G. Wasson, seeking to compel an accounting of a trusteeship said to have been accepted for creditors of the J. W. Holmes Co., Ltd.; about $1,700 is involved.
- Illustrated description of Emil Hafelfinger's Royal motor bicycle, now being built at the famous Victor plant at Chicopee Falls, Mass. — vertical cylinder cooling flanges, single-chain drive, thumb switch-button control, two-speed gear, top-tube oil reservoir and a claimed hundred miles per gallon and thirty miles an hour.
- Editorial holding that the Mail Order Journal's "sucker" and "profesh" language reeks of Josiah Flynt's "world of graft," and urging that the postal ban on green-goods circulars be extended to mail-order catalogs and pamphlets.
- Editorial noting that the 1901 bicycle is more satisfactory than any before it and the complaint book no longer a bulky volume, so that even small manufacturing errors are now regarded with little consideration.
- Editorial on the midsummer commencement and vacation trade — the indulgent parent buying the boy his promised machine — and the absolute necessity of being able to deliver the wanted bicycle at once.
- Editorial arguing that the enormous mail-order sales into the agricultural districts prove how far the sparsely settled sections remain from exhaustion as a field for the regular maker and dealer.
- Editorial calling the motor bicycle an advertising medium almost beyond price: a Massachusetts dealer counted three thousand callers in the first days after his first machine arrived, and a Connecticut dealer says it sold him more bicycles than he sold in all of last year.
- Reprints New York Fire Chief Croker's statement against the anti-gasolene ordinance — that parlor matches cause more fires than gasolene, that existing law suffices, and that he has used gasolene in automobiles for a year and a half without an accident.
- Editorial warning that the mail-order people's warm advocacy of parcels post and rural free delivery — the Mail Order Journal gloating over "the revolution that is crowding the country merchants to the wall" — is itself reason to resist extending them.
- A London correspondent writing on 12 June owns himself converted by long spins on the Werner motor bicycle, praising its steadiness, near absence of vibration and lower tire cost against the motor tricycle, and deploring district councils' attempts to bar motors from certain towns.
- Compares the Paris-Bordeaux motor race over 327 1/2 miles with Lesna's paced bicycle record of 21h. 53m. 40s.: Fournier's heavy racer averaged over 52 2-5 miles an hour and Teste's motor bicycle over 40 1-3, the tricycles' abnormal 8-horsepower motors explaining their margin over the 1 1/4-horsepower bicycles.
- The Bicycling World's Beirut correspondent, gathering names for the export editions, reports Syria opening up: a bicycle imported from Chicago was bought as a test, its companions sold at once, and a city of 120,000-135,000 should yield many purchasers now that 1900 and 1901 chain and chainless models are available.
- The R. M. Keating Motor Co., recently organized at Portland, Me., is reported to have leased the old Mills bell factory at Middletown, Conn.
- Consul Fleming at Edinburgh singles out bicycles and parts in a report on defective export packing, finding American crates and cases too weak for the rough handling always to be expected.
- The Motor Cycle Mfg. Co. of Brockton, Mass., besides the Marsh motor bicycle, sells parts to home builders; its aluminium float-feed carburetter, under a pound and made for 2-inch to 3-inch bore air-cooled motors, lists at $12 with the money refunded if it fails to work.
- The Knoll spring frame bicycle, claimed so luxurious that solid tires replace pneumatics, is being exhibited at New England points to secure agents.
- Weekly register of trade changes — G. H. Curtiss succeeding J. H. Smellie at Hammondsport, N. Y., Chase & Ticknor dissolved at Rockford, Ill., the Elmira Arms Co. buying out Paul A. Renton — with new stores at Martinsburg, Belfast, Kendall Mills and Cheshire, fires at Pawtucket and Oskaloosa and a $50 burglary at Buffalo.
- The Ball Tire Co. of New York City incorporates with $300,000 capital to make every kind of vehicle tire; the directors include Mendel Presberger of Passaic, N. J., and Maurice Moses, David Gordon and Hyman Pragoff of New York City.
- The Dow Portable Electric Assistant Co. of Boston has brought out a combined coil and battery for motocycles, encased in a single cylinder 2 1/2 inches in diameter and 11 inches long and weighing 7 1/2 pounds.
- A retort reprinted from the Farmington (Me.) Advertiser to the Kennebec Journal's claim that bicycle riding is considered old-fashioned this spring — bicycles, like wagons, are staple property now and the "fad" is off.
- Reports of the week's meets: the accident-strewn Madison Square Garden opener of 24 June, where McFarland and Nelson both crashed into a fallen pacing tandem in the thirteenth mile; Walthour beating Michael over 25 miles at Manhattan Beach in 41.41 2-5; Stinson's 39.07 at Charles River Park; Cooper's win at Vailsburg; Moran beating Ross at Providence; and Major Taylor sailing home from Europe nearly unbeaten.
- Referee in bankruptcy Francis K. Pendleton dissects the Supreme Court's decision in the Carson, Pirie, Scott & Co. case: a creditor paid in good faith within four months of bankruptcy may keep the money or surrender it to share pari passu, while one with reasonable cause to believe a preference was intended must refund it.
- Two Iver Johnson Pacers are missing — No. 94,473, taken from travelling representative C. Ford Seeley outside the American House at Pittsfield, Mass., and vermilion No. 77,510 with Palmer tires and Morrow coaster-brake, stolen at Stamford, Conn., on 8 June.
- Le Velo's March table for Paris credits the horse with 77 deaths and 739 injuries against the bicycle's 3 and 66 and the automobile's 3 and 29 — 83.70 per cent of all deaths — with shying or swerving the usual cause.
- An ex-racing man turned dealer tells the Bicycling World that although bad weather killed April and May sales, storing, hiring, repairing and sundries brought in about $150 in an unexceptional week and carry him from March to November; a $90 nickelled chainless with cushion frame and coaster-brake was one of two sales in a single day.
- An English court action over Ernest Terah Hooley's affairs disclosed that Frank Bowden of the Raleigh Cycle Co. was to take a third of the American Humber concern's profits — which the concern never showed.
- W. D. Wilmot, the veteran Fall River (Mass.) dealer, rode his Auto-Bi the 110 miles to Springfield in ten hours on five quarts of gasolene costing about 25 cents to see the new Hendee motor bicycle, and returned without a particle of trouble.
- The E. R. Thomas Motor Co. has issued a booklet of letters from the men who are selling and riding motor bicycles, meant to help the hesitating buyer decide.
- Reprints Fred T. Merrill's Portland (Ore.) newspaper "warning" against cheap-John bicycles and fly-by-night dealers, printed with J. C. Maurer's Chicago letter offering 150 U. S. ladies' bicycles at $9 each and other models at $10.50.
- Abstracts of the week's grants — Curtis H. Veeder's register assigned to the Veeder Mfg. Co., Marshall L. Wood's gas engine, Sterling Elliott's bicycle coupling, Jens H. Langgaard's cork-cored elastic tire, a Toepel, Widmayer and Potdevin motor cycle and Benton V. Canfield's inflatable tire — with design patents to Harold Jarvis and Charles Perkes.
- Weekly tabulation of bicycle and material shipments by port, led by London with 363 cases of bicycles at $4,851 and 110 of material at $10,904, followed by Copenhagen, Havre, Rotterdam and Lausanne.
- A British appeal has been denied, upholding Cumisky's $250 verdict against the dealer who guaranteed a second-hand Osmond to stand fast long-distance road work; one forkside was alleged to be thin and the fork broke.
- A recent British patent turns the rider's up-and-down "bumping" into propulsion, a rod sliding in the seat tube driving a ball clutch on the crank axle through a pin working in a curved slot.
- The Associated Cycling Clubs of Philadelphia, after a trade-backed road race, propose a big run to Atlantic City on 14 July in emulation of the monster events of six years ago, while the dealers talk of a coasting contest on the hills round the Quaker City.
- A two-man shop method: glue is brushed on with a wide brush while one operator feeds the belt round, then a six- or eight-inch pulley slung on two eighteen-inch broom-handle sections is brought down smartly into a shallow box of hot emery, the belts being hung to dry before use.
- A Welsh puncture-proof tire built of finest sheet steel cut into half sections about four inches long, canvas-covered and placed between tube and cover, working in and out both diametrically and circumferentially under the slightest pressure.
- Capital is again rumoured for the Wapshare tire, the only tire to withstand the Dunlop Co.'s assaults, that company's infringement suit having been dismissed about a year ago.