The Bicycling World, Vol 43, No 25
Articles in this issue
- Ahead of its annual meeting the American Bicycle Co. is reported to be concentrating on four factories and four sales departments — Columbia, Cleveland, Rambler and Crescent — having already closed the Reading and Milwaukee plants, dropped the Crawford sales department and merged Monarch into Columbia; the New York headquarters is expected to shrink to an executive office.
- The T. M. Roberts Supply House of Minneapolis, the mail-order concern that offered a so-called bicycle for $7.84, is in the hands of receivers, with a creditors' meeting called in Chicago.
- The I. A. Weston Co. of Syracuse has bought the Jamesville (N. Y.) Mfg. Co. outright to expand into wire wheels alongside its Champion and Vulcan hubs, and H. Romeyn Smith succeeds Frank Land as secretary-treasurer.
- The Equitable Distributing Co., the New England retail pool, is incorporated in Maine with $250,000 capital; President Havener expects more than half of the region's 3,500 dealers to join, while the jobbers plan a Boston meeting to organise opposition.
- The Springfield (Mass.) Drop Forging Co. has sold its one-piece and cotter-pin crank hanger business to the Straight Mfg. Co. of Jamestown, N. Y., with the Crosby Company of Buffalo retained as selling agents and still supplying crank boxes and ball cups.
- The Kelsey Co. of Buffalo, successor to Matthew Straus's jobbing business, has bought out rival H. C. Colton and will move to 39 and 41 Court Street after November 1st.
- Frank F. Weston returns to the coaster-brake trade as secretary-treasurer of the new $100,000 Barwest Coaster-Brake Co. of 99 Chambers Street, New York, and sets out eleven claims for the nine-piece Barwest hub, including a phosphor-bronze expanding brake ring and a weight penalty of only 1.5 lb.
- L. C. Havener, the veteran Worcester (Mass.) dealer, reports that although bicycle sales have fallen, sundries and repair work have been so strong he has only now cut the department's staff; he would rather sell automobilists tires and pumps than the vehicles themselves.
- Rudge-Whitworth have adopted flush joints as a feature of their 1902 models, breaking the united English opposition to the American innovation.
- Central Trust Co. of New York v. Worcester Cycle Mfg. Co. came before Judge Arthur L. Brown in Boston, over the city's $1,500 tax claim pressed by City Solicitor Rugg and a $320,000 foreclosure decree, with T. Hovey Gage jr. fighting to preserve $14,000 for general creditors.
- The Automobile Club's New York to Buffalo endurance run was called off at Rochester on news of President McKinley's death, Class D's motor bicycles having been beaten by mud between Fonda, Herkimer and Syracuse; Metz on an Orient and Ferguson and Sherman on Thomas Auto-Bis pressed on despite falls, while the Hendee broke a fork and the three Regas machines went astray.
- The Fourth International Automobile, Cycle and Sports Exposition is set for December 10-25 at the Grand Palais, Paris, with M. Gustave Rives of 6 Place de la Concorde chairing the organising committee.
- The Yorkshire County Cycle Co. of Leeds is being wound up, and the business of Lamplugh & Co., the veteran English saddle makers, is offered for sale.
- The Wisconsin Wheel Works have issued a Spanish-language catalog of the Mitchell motor bicycle, said to be the first of its kind.
- Following the absorption of the Shelby Steel Tube Co. by the United States Steel Corporation, the price of tubing has advanced 5 per cent.
- An unheaded mourning leader on the assassination of President McKinley, arguing that a chieftain's death proves the nation has a heart, dissolves party strife, and stirs a savage impulse against the assassin.
- The paper again urges American makers to adopt the English guarantee clause covering only machines bought direct or from authorised agents, as the surest way to undo the price cutters who advertise “all prominent makes at cut prices.”
- An editorial on the motor bicycles of Class D being overwhelmed in the endurance contest, holding that no vehicle depending on momentum for equilibrium can master deep, slippery mud, and noting that some thirty higher-powered vehicles in other classes failed too.
- An editorial reply to A. J. Wilson's tirade against “American bounce,” asking why the English bicycle once dominated the American market under the same tariff that exists today, and noting that the Bicycling World has itself urged the tariff's repeal.
- The London letter of September 4 reports the Century Motor Company and the Simms Manufacturing Co. now building small motors for bicycles, the Simms-Bosch ignition dispensing with batteries, and Singer & Co.'s new “Tri-Voiturette” with a basket seat or carrier at the rear.
- A technical explanation, from the Cycle Trader, of the rope-brake B.H.P. test and the indicator-based I.H.P. test, working a sample gas engine at 160 revolutions to 15.1 B.H.P. against 18.6 I.H.P. — a mechanical efficiency of 81.2 per cent.
- United States exports for the year ending August 31, 1901 reached $1,500,618,236, the first twelve-month period to cross the billion-and-a-half mark, against $1,399,000,520 a year earlier.
- The Holland Industrial Cycle and Automobile Association has organised an international exposition to be held at Amsterdam in February 1902.
- A. J. Wilson, writing in the Irish Cyclist, echoes E. J. O'Reilly of the Cycle Times in blaming the American tariff for killing the English cycle trade in the States, recalls the ponderous American machines of twelve years ago, and dismisses French wares as deteriorating and German bicycles as “gaspipe and solder.”
- Theoretical and practical cycle work now forms part of the curriculum of the Coventry (England) Technical Institute, open only to skilled workmen already in the trade and with theory and drawing required before the practical course.
- Quoting the Saturday Evening Post, a Philadelphia writer argues the next great field for invention is quiet rather than speed, citing oiled railroad tracks, asphalt paving, station gardens and curbs on street music as signs of the coming demand.
- Frank Kramer clinches the 1901 N. C. A. championship with the five-mile race at Hartford on the 16th and a record 10m. 55 2-5s. behind single pacing; Jimmy Michael beats Harry Elkes over fifteen miles at the Garden and Albert Champion over twenty at Hartford, McEachern laps Burns Pierce at Baltimore, McFarland wins the twenty-five-mile unpaced at Madison Square Garden, and Schreiber breaks the amateur quarter record at Vailsburg.
- From a paper by J. A. Steinmetz read at the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia: aluminum's use in steel metallurgy, in foundry patterns a third the weight of brass, in steam-jacketed kettles, in Chicago fire-alarm wiring trials, and as powder and leaf for flashlights and bookbinding — held back chiefly by the want of a good solder.
- C. A. Persons, president of the Royal Motor Works, says a year's observation has convinced him that the successful bicycle dealer of the past will be the successful motocycle dealer of the future, rather than the automobile trade absorbing that business.
- A Hamburg price cutter who sold rotten inner tubes at 85 cents now claims tubes are not tires under his guarantee; the German Cycle Dealers' Association has taken the case up for the courts.
- R. J. Mecredy holds that the adhesion of inner tube to cover has been a prime factor in reducing the speed and resiliency of double-tube tires, the detachable tire's speed being due to air tube and cover being genuinely separate.
- Twenty companies of cyclists are to be added to the French Army next year, equipped with a 36-pound folding bicycle that can be strapped to the back.
- Week's grants include McFarland's rotary explosive engine (682,385), Peet's elastic valve attachment for pneumatic tires, Bolton's puncture-repair tool, Patterson's lap-weld tubing method for the National Tube Company, a Ray and Brandt spring-plate saddle base, Woodward's air-tight tubing fabric, and a design patent to MacLulich of London for a metallic wheel-rim.
- The Barwest Coaster Brake Company ($100,000, Jersey City, incorporators Weston, Berry, Coates, McManus and Enright), the American Rubber Works ($1,000,000, Jersey City) and the Elmira Arms Company ($20,000) are newly chartered.
- Trade changes of the week: Pierre Baker reopening at San Jacinto, E. R. Braley building on at Pasadena, Owen Barnard of New Britain damaged by fire, Bert Wheeler of Greenville sold to Taylor and Jenks, McDaniel & Kemp of Wilmington dissolved, and New Haven's Veru Bicycle & Rubber Co. cutting its capital to $8,000.
- Consul Ozmun writes from Stuttgart that German dealers laugh at American bicycles, the trade having been killed by cheap goods dumped a few years ago, and that American makers must undersell, give time and print German-language literature to re-enter the market.
- For the week ending September 10 only Great Britain, Holland, Denmark and France bought more than $1,000 of American cycle goods; London took 103 cases of bicycles at $1,075, Liverpool 53 at $1,170 and Rotterdam 23 at $1,122, with smaller lots to Antwerp, Genoa, Havre, Cuba and the Argentine Republic.