The Bicycling World, Vol 43, No 3
Articles in this issue
- Charles R. Flint's testimony before the Industrial Commission at Washington on the economies of combination, citing a 25 per cent saving on travelling men at the United States Rubber Company and the blind-pool capitalisation used to form the Rubber Goods Manufacturing Company.
- H. H. Bowman, trustee of the Overman Wheel Co., wins abatement of Chicopee, Mass., taxes after E. P. Kendrick valued the plant below its assessment, bringing rebates of $577.80 for 1898 and $649.02 for 1899.
- The wood rim plant of the Indiana Novelty Co. at Plymouth, Ind., once the largest single-piece rim works in the country, will be offered for sale on May 22.
- The Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court sustains the transfer of the Tillinghast patent to the Single Tube Co., defeating the Tillinghast Tire Association's minority stockholders in the suit styled "Booth et al. vs. Dodge et al."
- The National Association of Manufacturers fixes June 4, 5 and 6 at Detroit for its sixth annual convention, with Michigan vice president George H. Barbour in general charge of arrangements.
- The boom in steel has caught cycle makers short, leaving several parts and fittings scarce and sending "as specified" orders back to vex the trade.
- Application has been made to the Connecticut courts to dissolve the Joseph Lucas & Sons Co. of Bristol, maker of the English Lucas lamps; its business has passed to the New Departure Bell Co.
- A list of the bicycle bills before the Connecticut legislature: Senator Goodrich on weekly reporting of sales to police, Donovan of New Haven on turning to the right to pass, Woodruff of Orange on a twelve-mile motor vehicle limit, and Main and Travis on sidepaths and sidepath commissioners.
- The Toledo "Blade" reports that the American Bicycle Company trust is being quietly dissolved and its plants sold back to their original owners, quoting an agent that competition, not the trust, created the demand for wheels.
- The Bicycling World derides the Cycling Gazette for printing anonymous self-praise alongside a stale item on Fisk Rubber manager Harry T. Dunn's Pacific Coast trip, which this paper reported on February 28 and March 28.
- The New York Court of Appeals affirms judgment against the defunct Worcester Cycle Manufacturing Company and indorser Camille Weidenfeld on J. Burnett Nash's $3,560 promissory note, holding the pleaded delay and warranty defences insufficient.
- W. H. Paull tells the Cycle Engineers' Institute at Birmingham that the single-tube tire is the simplest, lightest and fastest pneumatic, and that the English article differs wholly from the American; P. L. Renouf and an English journalist dispute him.
- Superintendent Hillery reports to Buffalo's Commissioners of Public Works that Main street bicycle racks carry advertisements and obstruct traffic, and warns that improper racks may be seized and made into kindling wood.
- New concerns: the Midget Mfg. Co. of Buffalo for luggage carriers, the Soucy Bicycle Co. of Portland, Me., under George P. Gould, and the Ellsworth Mfg. Co. of Ellsworth, Me., for automobiles, bicycles and carriages.
- Contrasts the ordinary era, when catalogues told riders to oil every bearing at every use until oil dripped from every hole, with modern ball bearings that riders now run far too long dry.
- Editorial urging makers to follow the Eclipse Mfg. Co., which took a Buffalo jobber to court over Morrow coaster-brake prices, and citing Sorosis shoes, Fownes gloves, Kodaks and the Bissell sweeper as goods whose prices never vary.
- Editorial on a London Times investigator's conclusion that American factory results cannot be duplicated abroad, while American selling methods leave the maker's lead lost at the point of marketing.
- Editorial on the yearly flood of buying advice in the daily papers, written with too little knowledge of the subject to help the small number of purchasers who really need it.
- Editorial naming R. Lindsay Coleman and Theodore F. Merseles over the reappearance of the fictitious "Dr. Mary Easton," whose endorsement of American Bicycle Co. wheels the paper traced to the A. B. C. advertising department.
- Unheaded editorial notes on German courts fining Hamburg and Darmstadt dealers for extravagant bicycle advertising, on "cycle mad" Minneapolis and the cycling columns of its Tribune and Times, and on J. K. Starley reviving the crank-versus-lever question.
- Paris letter arguing the voiturette will not displace the motocycle; the De Dion, Perfecta-Soncin and Gladiator tricycles over the Esterel at Nice, Beconnais's 17:21 climb to La Turbie, and the $3,000 damages laid on motocyclist Dorel.
- The Hartford Rubber Works' colour catalogue calls its single tube a "speaking tube" and bids riders tired of other tires turn to the "heavenly Hartfords."
- A "Cyclist" correspondent on the Indian trade: raffles and hiring outdo direct sales, grocers, wine merchants and jewellers vend wheels, and a Calcutta student's begging letter asks fifty rupees for a second-hand "bisicle."
- Harry R. Geer of 1017 Pine Street, St. Louis, printed thousands of mock ballot cards reading "Vote for Harry R. Geer, regular nominee for the Most Popular Bicycle Dealer," and is now raffling a tricycle to boom motocycles.
- Major Taylor beats German champion Willie Arend at Berlin and takes the tandem race with him, cabling the news to Iver Johnson's Arms and Cycle Works of Fitchburg; he meets Jacquelin on May 16.
- On the contradictory demands made of a driving-wheel tire — grip without sticking, radial elasticity without circumferential stretch — and how the tangential fabric stiffened the tire circumferentially without harming its resilience.
- The Minneapolis Tribune quotes a local dealer on a woman who came in wanting to pawn her wedding ring in order to get a wheel.
- How repairing grew from a grudging adjunct of the retail store into independent shops, and the system used by a large repairer called "Blank": fixed-price estimating, repair tags in cipher, a numbered daily order-of-precedence list and workmen's memorandum books checked against ten hours a day.
- Fred T. Merrill denies that price cutting is affecting the Portland, Ore., trade; his bicycle sales have passed 2,000 despite bad weather, with six men kept busy day and evening.
- Will R. Pitman and Emil Hafelfinger complete a hundred miles on Hafelfinger's New York Show motor bicycle inside ten hours, the horizontal cooling flanges never overheating though the batteries ran down after sixty miles.
- The Sager Gear Co. of Rochester, N. Y., brings out a coaster saddle with an unusual spring for riders whose weight rests wholly on the seat, and offers to exchange it free if it fails to satisfy.
- The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle's account of the machine's evolution from the toe-propelled velocipede, crediting the pneumatic tire to L. C. Smith of New York and naming Pope, Overman and Gormully & Jeffery as the three great makers.
- A. W. Gamage, Ltd. writes that its petition to revoke the Veeder cyclometer patent in England was partly successful, the Chancery Division holding the first claim bad and granting leave to amend Claim 2.
- A well known engineer argues that the research laboratory must move out of the engineering college and into industry, since the time approaches when no machine will be accepted without a tested guarantee of its efficiency.
- The Rochester (N. Y.) Cycle Mfg. Co. appeals to bicycle agents with a steam runabout: 4-horsepower two-cylinder reversible engine, seamless steel boiler tested to 600 pounds cold water, and six gallons of gasolene for about seventy miles.
- English trade circles are perturbed by a retailer selling bicycles at sixpence a day, though the paper notes the monthly total of $3.60 is no worse than instalment terms long common.
- Frame heights swung from medium to high and then, with whirlwind rapidity, to twenty and twenty-one inches; medium heights now rule and height has ceased to be a factor in the game.
- Gears are little discussed nowadays, but the upward movement in gearing has been checked, which the paper thinks no cause for regret.
- The weekly trade register of fires, changes and new stores, from a tire-cement explosion at J. A. Cramer's on Main street, Buffalo, to new repair shops from Blair, Wis., and Moline, Ill., to Rock Springs, Wyo.
- A Minneapolis dealer describes rogues who collect owners' names at repair shops and send forged delivery orders; one repairer released a wheel only after recognising the owner's pair of fox terriers outside.
- The Sager Gear Co. of Rochester takes a large order for gears and fittings from the Adler Fahrradwerke Co. of Frankfort-on-Main, sent with blue prints dimensioning even the tiniest screws.
- J. M. Linscott, manager of the Boston Cycle and Sundry Co., reports his big deal in Fisk and Kangaroo tires keeping his men on the move despite two weeks of inclement weather.
- A Cycle Trader contributor on the workman who stripped a Premier bracket thread pulling left-handed and later fitted a free-wheel clutch the wrong way round, and on the micrometer, Vernier gauge and shop drawings replacing him.
- John C. Patterson of the United Supply Co., Boston, back at work after convalescing at Old Point Comfort, asked first for the back numbers of the Bicycling World, says his partner George F. Kehew.
- British consular reports on Greece: cheap German machines outsell English ones, catalogues need translations in Greek, Italian or French with metric weights and decimal prices, and Thessaly now has 143 miles of carriage roads and a new chamber of commerce at Volo.
- The full Yarmouth, Nova Scotia repair tariff — $3.50 to replace and enamel a top tube, 25 cents for a single-tube puncture, $3.00 to enamel frame and forks black — showing prices only slightly under United States rates.
- Charles Horwitz of 303 Washington avenue, Minneapolis, threatened to shoot the inspectors appointed under the new stolen-machine law and was arrested on a charge of disorderly conduct.
- The Marshall-Wells Hardware Company of Duluth, Minn., cycle jobbers, move into a vast new store and plan a San Francisco branch for the Oriental trade after keeping an agent in China and Japan for a year.
- Claims granted this week, including Clarence K. Davis's bicycle brake, Johannes Grimme's hand-driving mechanism for the front wheel, Albert H. Field's handle-bar extension, Henry T. Vaders's motor and James W. Cromer's changeable gear for safety bicycles.
- A hardware man's plan of pasting an envelope flap-side front inside a catalog's cover to hold the discount sheet, so it can be withdrawn in a second before the book is handed to a customer.
- Oliver H. P. Stoddard of Dame, Stoddard & Co., Boston hardware and cycle jobbers, is dead at the age of 57.
- Cycle export returns for the week closing April 9: Hamburg took 211 cases of bicycles at $5,415, Copenhagen 122 cases at $3,043 and Southampton $6,090 of material, with England and Germany again the heaviest purchasers.
- The Hurricane head shield, from a well known English lamp maker, fastens over an ordinary lamp to prevent a down draught extinguishing the flame and to improve the upward draught and illuminating power.
- A British exchange reports racing men now fitting 1 inch or even 7/8 inch single tube tires with straight forks and short heads, giving nearly as much vibration as a solid tire.
- J. K. Starley holds the cycle about as perfect as it can be, arguing that exerting force through the whole pedal circle instead of a third would bring no gain, and that only gear or pedal length can approximate the natural movement of walking.
- It has been decided that the London Stanley Cycling Club, which manages the Stanley cycle shows, took its name from Henry Stanley, the African explorer, then at the zenith of his fame.
- A rider's figures: on a 1 in 8 hill a 120-pound cyclist with a 30-pound machine and 66 2/3 gear meets 19 pounds of slope resistance and must exert 100 pounds at the pedal, though a testing machine shows he can press 280.
- An English firm's Featherweight, a stripped road racer, comes out at twenty-two pounds — light but not unprecedentedly so — and is priced at the tidy sum of $125.
- A French journal's disinfecting wash for shop walls and floors: 1,000 grams of chloride of zinc and 30 grams of hydrochloric acid dissolved in 10 litres of water, not to be touched with the hands.