The Bicycling World, Vol 43, No 22
Articles in this issue
- New England dealers plan a co-operative buying association, each member paying $25 a month from September to December to build working capital, buying sundries and tires for spot cash and reselling to members at 5 per cent over factory cost so as to eliminate the jobber.
- C. J. Iven & Co., of Rochester, N. Y., are appointed selling agents for pedals made by the Reed & Curtis Machine Screw Co., of Worcester, Mass., ending the story that the Worcester firm meant to quit the pedal business.
- Herbert E. Thompson, a salesman for the A. D. Meiselbach Co., of Milwaukee, has been arrested and jailed charged with embezzling about $1,000 by raising the amounts of five checks and having them cashed.
- Treasurer Ransom of the Snell Mfg. Co. and Manager Kirk of the Kirk Mfg. Co. go to Boston to establish a New England distributing point for Snell and Kirk bicycles, formerly handled by the United Supply Co.
- American Bicycle Co. bonds declined sharply despite a 2.5 per cent dividend payable 1 September, $12,000 selling at 70 and $2,000 at 66 on Tuesday.
- Hubert Egerton left the Land's End Hotel on 3 August on a Werner motor bicycle and reached John o' Groat's on 7 August, covering about a thousand miles in four days eight hours despite a gashed tire and two collisions.
- J. R. B. Ransom, treasurer of the Snell Mfg. Co., is back from a thirty-day visit to Germany and holds that the threatened duty increase will help American makers by shutting out cheap machines while leaving the better grades saleable.
- Dunlop Tire Co. debenture holders voted unanimously on 14 August for the reconstruction plan; the preference and then the ordinary and deferred stockholders must still be polled, the ordinary holders being reckoned the stumbling block.
- The Fisk Rubber Co. will shortly open a branch at Boston, Mass., Mr. Dunn being in the city to arrange location and management.
- Consul-General Mason writes from Berlin on the new German tariff bill, which raises the duty on bicycles and finished parts to 150 marks ($35.70) per 100 kilograms — about $3.57 on a 22-pound machine instead of $1 — and does not take effect until 1 January 1904.
- A recipe for reclaiming worn files: a minute in a 40-pound steam current to clean them, then an acid bath of seven parts water, three of sulphuric and one of nitric acid, followed by lime-water, olive and turpentine oil and pulverized coke.
- An Eastern rubber manufacturing company with $5,000,000 capital asks McKeesport, Pa., for a free eight-acre site, guaranteeing to employ 4,000 to 5,000 people; a local bicycle dealer laid the offer before the Board of Trade.
- An American in England tells how a well-known American bicycle lamp was ruined by over-planting firms with stock, granting sole agencies with freedom of price lists, and the price collapse that followed.
- Two New York motocyclists were arrested and arraigned for fast riding; one was dismissed with a warning as a first offender, the other held for trial as a persistent violator of the statutes.
- Frank M. Starbuck, of Glens Falls, N. Y., receiver for Laraway & Wells of Baker's Falls, is inventorying the stock for sale, the court holding there is a present market for bicycles; judgment for $199 was also entered against Edgar A. Holmes.
- Joseph Brucker, managing editor of the Illinois Staats-Zeitung, has started Columbia, a 48-page German-language trade paper printed in Berlin, backed by an information bureau, lectures and press work meant to soften German feeling toward American trade.
- Dr. Doolittle of Toronto, pioneer of the boneshaker, high wheel and safety and inventor of the back-pedalling brake, rode just over two hundred miles in fifteen hours on a Thomas Auto-Bi, and has covered 2,300 miles on it without repairs.
- The current Cyclist notes four serious English cycling accidents in two short paragraphs — a fatality on a brakeless machine, a fractured skull, a rider thrown fifty feet from a bridge after a broken chain — raising the question of hills, riders or machines.
- F. H. Bosson, long manager of the Pope Mfg. Co.'s bookkeeping department, has retired from the American Bicycle Co.; Miss A. L. Farrell, twelve years assistant manager of Pope's advertising department, has gone to "Outing" in New York.
- Justice Buckley, in the Chancery Division, dismissed with costs the Dunlop Tire Co.'s fourth suit against a licensee, holding the Grappler Tire Co. was free to buy fabric from the Cheshire Rubber Co. under its Welch-patent licence.
- Editorial arguing that the proposed German duty rise from 40 to 150 marks — about $3.50 a machine rather than $1 — will bar the "cheap and nasty" wheels lying unclaimed at Hamburg while leaving good American bicycles profitably saleable.
- Editorial on the modern bicycle's near-unwearoutable durability: frames and forks no longer collapse after two or three years, "crystallization" is no longer a comforting excuse, and repairer, dealer and maker all lose the replacement trade.
- Editorial contrasting the hardware dealer's system, seasonal displays and free use of printer's ink with the cycle dealer's habit of waiting for the buyer, and urging lamp and sundry pushes as the evenings shorten.
- Editorial arguing that no single feature — cushion frame, coaster, back-pedalling brake or chainless drive — is new, and that the modern machine's superiority comes from combining them with gradual improvement in sprockets, chains and tubing.
- A long survey of the trade's condition, set out under "Asking the Questions", "The Superficial View", "Truth of the Matter" and "Cycling's New Zest": pleasure riding has shrunk because the boom was overdone, but a saving remnant remains and the business bicycle is the larger question.
- Weekly race round-up: Lawson beat Kramer at Vailsburg and again at Madison Square Garden and Baltimore, Fenn took the 5-mile handicap in 10.15, Michael beat Elkes at Charles River Park and Stinson at Revere Beach, and Walthour broke indoor records with 24.19 3-5 for 15 miles.
- A Bicycling World emissary's visits to the Manhattan Storage Co.'s Park Row and Cortlandt street stores found the storage-seizure story dropped, no standard new machines, a $1.29 "Columbia road tire" of unknown make and salesmen who professed to know nothing.
- A Boston "yellow" journal reports milkmaids riding bicycles in "huge overlapping circles" to drive cows home from pasture, and country laundresses using them to collect and deliver washing.
- A. Mecky, of Philadelphia, has put out a motor bicycle listing at $250, with a 2.25 H.P. De Dion motor carried inside the frame above the crank hanger, belt drive and only two operating levers.
- The Hartford Rubber Works Co.'s annual conference of branch managers and salesmen, headed by President Lewis D. Parker, with a banquet at Compounce Lake at which retiring secretary J. C. Wilson was presented with a gold watch.
- Advice that rubber solution dries up in its collapsible tube, and that a little naphtha, benzine or gasolene dropped on the gummy residue will restore it to a usable liquid.
- A New York Commercial-Advertiser correspondent on the Scotch Highlands, where "Sandy" still rides the ordinary — second-hand high wheels shipped north by dealers and New York exporters — because a $5-a-week wage will not stretch to an up-to-date safety.
- A German correspondent reports the German cycle industry's decline: firms insolvent or turned to other goods, a 50 per cent fall in trade over two years, prices cut by overproduction, and heavy foreign imports paying only 2.50 marks duty.
- The status of motor bicycles, tricycles and quadricycles as railway baggage is still unsettled; the Railway Age argues sarcastically that self-propelled vehicles should come on their own legs, citing Vanderbilt's imported forty-ton machine.
- To obtain bright colors on case-hardened parts the work must be nicely polished and perfectly clean; greasy, poorly finished work will not take them.
- The Cable Cycle Co., of Brockton, Mass., has passed out of existence after a long period of inactivity, the Commonwealth Motor and Engine Co. taking its place.
- A tradesman's account of an ex-dealer who bought a 75-cent "second" tire for a long tour and then spent more on repair kits, plugs, cement and vulcanizing — and nearly twice the time — than a good $3 or $4 tire would have cost.
- The Cycle Trader's tale of an English dealer who, on hearing a proffered trade-in was American, advised its owner to "try to get it stolen" — met here with the retort that his £5 or £6 offer deserved no better.
- Consul Halstead at Birmingham says the selling blunders of the American bicycle invasion of Britain were forced by manufacturers at home on their own protesting representatives, and that only three of the hundreds of American salesmen he has met claimed proper home support.
- The Australian Cyclist reports English machines almost driven from the interstate market by American ones, and urges a dozen of the best English houses to combine and open a Melbourne agency instead of leaving the field to "everlasting parts".
- H. A. Testard, a New Orleans dealer, denies that cycling has declined in the Crescent City, holding that riders are as numerous as ever but less conspicuous now the wheel is an implement of use rather than a society fad.
- Aluminum bronze under 5 per cent aluminum takes tin solder; above that a solder of 20 per cent zinc and 15 per cent cadmium is used, with brazing done at 52 per cent copper, 46 zinc and 2 tin.
- A trade-journal writer argues that advertisers should describe their wares in detail, suggest displays and retailing methods, and vary the advertisement from issue to issue rather than printing only name, address and a list of goods.
- Eight patents with claims, among them Patrick G. McCollam's propelling mechanism, William E. Hoyle's cellular pneumatic tire, a mud-guard support by Stevens, Harrold and Bluemel of London, and James F. Morrissey's tire-valve connection-piece.
- Trade changes: W. E. Champaign succeeds J. W. Butts at Wellsboro, Pa.; M. J. Curran succeeds Curran & Powers at Adams, Mass.; W. J. Devall removes to Burns's Block, Pittsfield; Louis De Berhle succeeds Peter Rutan at Port Jervis, N. Y.; Beach & Parks succeed Beach & Sons at Lancaster, N. H.
- The Lawrence (Mass.) Eagle reports Cyprien Souey, of Manchester, N. H., in town showing a new springing bicycle said to run without pneumatic tires.
- The Hydra Manufacturing Agency of New York with $50,000 capital, and the Fauber Mfg. Co. of Elgin, Ill., with $350,000 capital, incorporated by W. H. Fauber, Frank A. Burgess and Henry W. Norton.
- Great Britain again heads the week's bicycle exports, London taking 286 cases ($3,698) and Southampton 101 cases of material ($3,582), with Havre, Hamburg, Turin, Rotterdam, Copenhagen, Russia and Cuba also figuring.
- Montague A. Holbein, the Englishman who last week attempted to swim the English Channel, was the famous road and 24-hour record breaker of the early nineties who took to swimming after several bad accidents.