The Bicycling World, Vol 43, No 15
Articles in this issue
- Buffalo, July 6: the Cycle Makers' Protective Association's call brings together almost every manufacturer of note outside the Trust and nearly all the leading parts makers, who hear counsel Dyrenforth on the bottom-bracket suit and pledge to hold the independent trade solid.
- The Leader Mfg. Co. of Toronto assigns to Henry Bennett after the Canada Cycle and Motor Co. obtained an $844 judgment and the Bank of Commerce issued a writ for a $302 claim.
- The American Dunlop Tire Co. of Belleville, N.J., files a bill in equity at Pittsburgh to restrain the Pennsylvania Rubber Co. of Erie from selling tires and inner tubes as "Dunlop" goods; Judge Acheson reserves decision on the preliminary injunction.
- The English Dunlop Tire Co.'s new list drops rebates for a sliding scale of prices, cuts tires 2s. per pair and rims to 1s. 3d., and lengthens the guarantee to thirteen months, with a fresh schedule due October 1.
- John H. Cheever, president of the New York Belting and Packing and Mechanical Rubber Companies, dies at seventy-seven at his home at Wave Crest, Far Rockaway, N.Y., after six years an invalid.
- Indiana's County Board of Review restores the assessment on the old Indiana Bicycle Co. (Waverley) plant at Indianapolis from the $67,015 returned by the American Bicycle Co. to $144,775, Assessor Jefferson charging that the trusts are evading taxation.
- The Toledo Common Pleas Court discharges T. B. Terry as receiver of the Maumee Cycle Co., the business in the First National Bank's suit having been wound up and the assets distributed.
- Judgment for $1,147.65 in favor of J. B. Hicks against the Monarch Cycle Mfg. Co. is entered in New York.
- A dealer relates how one nameless pair out of a job lot of cheap tires ran two seasons and more, leaving a customer who will ride nothing else pestering him daily for duplicates that neither he nor his jobber can trace.
- Stockholders George H. Kelly, Clayton K. Gouver, George Cook Ford, Francis G. Coates and Paul Walton petition the courts to dissolve the debt-free Columbus Bicycle Co. of Columbus, O., capital $50,000 in 500 shares.
- Cable dispatches from London of July 8 report a circular to Dunlop Tire Co. stockholders proposing to reduce capital from £4,573,200 to £3,213,200.
- Chr. Aachen and Chr. Gottschalk of Copenhagen and Romain Tallbott of Berlin, all importers of American cycles and accessories, are buying in New York and stopping at the Broadway Central Hotel.
- L. A. Hine of the Hine-Watts Mfg. Co., Chicago, reports Columbia gas lamp sales up 18 per cent despite the rain and a held $1.95 price, and calls the mail-order houses "the pirates of business," citing Sears, Roebuck & Co.'s listing of 300 out-of-date lamps as new goods at 55 cents under the agreed price.
- The Bicycling World's search for export-edition data turns up Harpoot, Turkey as a promising market, where a former Hartford man's new store is doing well and United States Consul Thomas H. Norton was the first to ride a bicycle.
- Two 1901 "Gladiator" machines belonging to Linton, the Welsh racing man, prove bald copies of English practice — cotter pins, external seat and bar fastenings, small large-flanged hubs, shrouded sprockets — yet scale only twenty-one or twenty-two pounds stripped.
- Endorses the point of the Strauss Rubber and Tire Co.'s advertisement, that fitting solid rubber tires to carriages and other vehicles is a field that should dovetail well with cycle repairing.
- William A. Bremer, a Milwaukee bicycle manufacturer, files a bankruptcy petition scheduling liabilities of $3,761.89 against assets of $2,253, $350 of it claimed exempt, with $1,250 of stock on hand.
- A correspondent at Chefoo reports that the increased coal traffic following the China trouble has ruined the streets and roads, making it impossible to use a bicycle.
- J. J. Francis, a prominent Boston dealer and formerly manager of the Liberty branch there, has failed after two years running the business on his own account.
- Explains why a cyclometer striker occasionally turns two teeth of the star wheel at once — either bad adjustment of the distance from the striker or a loose-fitting star wheel — and prescribes tightening the wheel as the remedy.
- Taking its text from the Bevin Bros. Mfg. Co. advertisement, divides retailers into those who merely keep goods for sale and those who go after sales with changing window displays, circular letters, novelties and sundry follow-ups.
- Traces the reaction against the elaborate front sprocket patterns of the boom years and the steady return to plain five- and six-arm straight-arm wheels.
- Answers critics who want coaster-brake makers to issue ironclad rules on crank position and gradual back-pedalling, holding that one or two disastrous experiences teach the novice more than printed instructions, and that crank position is one rider's meat and another's poison.
- Argues that although ninety-five per cent of those who go into business fail and cycle retailers fare worse than most, the dealer who advertises, repairs and hunts business in his own little world wins success by main force where the grumbler does not.
- Contrasts the N. C. A.'s prompt $100 fine on "Major" Taylor for missing the Madison Square Garden meet two days off shipboard with its hesitation over Fred Hoyt, who confessed to winning a Manhattan Beach race by fraud and is offered perhaps a month's suspension.
- London, June 26: police station officers with large books and plain-clothes men with snapshot cameras on the highways out of London to trap motocyclists exceeding the twelve-mile limit, while country parsons join the outcry; also notes on quieter exhaust boxes, fibre gear wheels and the Sirdar Rubber Co.'s compressed band.
- Describes heating 500 or 1,000 barrels of crude oil, condensing the first vapor through water-cooled coils, then washing the liquid with sulphuric acid and alkali in the mixer before drawing off the 76, 74 and 68 degree grades to their tanks.
- A rider arrested for leading one wheel with one hand while riding another "hands off" is released after the court hears he was in effect on a four-wheeled vehicle and menacing nobody.
- A tour of the Hartford Rubber Works, where Para "biscuits" are washed into tripe-like sheets, compounded, calendered into Sea Island friction fabric, built up on mandrels and "cooked" thirty-eight minutes at 194 degrees; 700 hands turn out 4,500 tires a day and Secretary Wilson's fabric orders ran to 400,000 yards.
- Traces aluminum from its 1855 debut at the Paris Exhibition, when it cost about as much as gold, to a world output of some 7,000 tons at thirty cents a pound, and notes that a tungsten alloy is as strong as gun metal yet works as easily as brass.
- R. E. Froude of the British Admiralty Experiment Works writes that American cyclometers — now the only ones on the market — overlog by about 4 per cent, or a mile in 25, being geared to nominal wheel diameter; of the Trenton, New Era and 1901 Veeder tested at Gamage's, only the Veeder's 730 revolutions was partly corrected.
- Quotes a transatlantic writer's river simile to separate the two terms: the volt is the speed of the stream and the ampere its quantity.
- Advises fresh oil and a new loose-textured wick cut two to three inches for an oil lamp that will not stay alight, and blames much lamp trouble on cheap grades of kerosene.
- Recommends squirting kerosene into the oil holes and spinning the wheels to flush out dirty oil, treating bracket bearings, pedals and head likewise, then relubricating with a good grade little and often.
- The Merkel Mfg. Co. of Milwaukee, successor to the Layton Park plant, puts out a 78-pound motor bicycle with single-lever control giving four to thirty miles an hour, an aluminum crank case clearing the Standard Fauber cranks, 7-inch fly wheels and the exhaust muffled through the lower bar and seat mast.
- The Western Passenger Association, in session at Chicago, debates carrying motocycles as excess baggage; a committee majority holds them too heavy and bulky for the baggage cars, as automobiles have already been barred.
- A Dunlop source advises coating a dried outer-cover patch and its edges with equal parts rubber solution and powdered sulphur, then standing the tire eight hours to form a hard film.
- Weekly round-up: Munroe beats Du Bois at Brockton, Elkes reappears at Revere Beach, McFarland outclasses Linton at Madison Square Garden, Kramer takes the quarter-mile circuit championship and a record 2-mile handicap at Vailsburg, Fenn wins from scratch there, Michael beats McEachern, and Hoyt is disqualified at Manhattan Beach for being towed by a violin string.
- Notes that a spring or elastic bar deformed within its elastic limits gives back most but not all of the work put into it, some being lost in the molecular displacement of the material against itself.
- Weekly trade register: Clarence Bushnell succeeds Arthur Cheney at Ivoryton, Conn.; L. G. Bartlett of Ripon, Wis., loses $600 by fire; new stores open at Canton and Utica, N.Y., West Union, O., Harrisville, R.I., Groveland, N.Y., and Milwaukee, Wis.
- The paper offers six months' subscription to the Bicycling World for each copy of The Wheel of August 23, 1900, sent in.
- Abstracts of claims in patents 677,373 to 677,830, among them Rauhoff's resilient handle-bar, Columbus Stone's spring-lined tire, Crary's acetylene generating lamp, Sturges's hub, Edward Y. White's two motor-bicycle frames and Ernest L. Morse's coaster brake, with Henry C. England's "Wyoma" coaster-brake trade mark.
- Detail of New York cycle shipments for the week closing July 2, dominated by England and Holland — London took 747 cases of bicycles worth $8,699 and Rotterdam 188 worth $4,430 — with a $2,675 shipment to China the striking feature.
- Explains why most cut gears are of involute form: simpler cutters than cycloidal, less tooth-profile variation on bevels, eight interchangeable cutters against twenty-four, and the fact that only involute teeth can be generated.
- Deplores the weird lever-propulsion designs that keep cropping up in the world's patent records, arguing that inventors should learn cycling before inventing given the efficiency of the modern chain and chainless gears.