The Bicycling World, Vol 43, No 4
Articles in this issue
- The Bridgeport Gun Implement Company buys the Record pedal name, patents, stock and machinery from H. W. Wyman of Worcester, and is expected to press the patents along the line; the deal obliges the American Bicycle Company to pay three cents a pair royalty on Record-type pedals.
- The Baldwin Automobile Co. of Providence sues the defunct Relay Mfg. Co. of Reading, Pa. for $10,000, claiming it contracted on 18 January 1900 to buy the plant for $2,500 cash and $2,000 in stock, only for Relay to sell out to other parties for $5,000; tried before Judge Endlich at Reading.
- After a long struggle the Sanger Handle Bar and Plating Co. of Milwaukee is preparing a voluntary bankruptcy petition, its larger creditors having decided that bankruptcy best protects all; no statement of assets and liabilities is yet available.
- William O'Dea, a Columbus, Ohio minor whose finger was mashed in a punching machine at the Admiral Lamp Co. works, is awarded $300 damages after suing through his next friend, John O'Dea, on the ground that the punch press was out of order.
- The last of the old Union Cycle Mfg. Co.'s machinery is removed from Highlandville, Mass. to Worcester; the plant was small and never made many cycles, but those it made were of the superlative class.
- W. T. Griffin, United States Commercial Agent at Limoges, sets out what American exporters must do to sell in France - catalogues in French with metric weights and franc prices, attractive presentation, exact conformity to samples, quotations including cost, freight and insurance, and use of the commercial directory 'Le Bottin'.
- The Boston Cycle Repairers' Association enters its third year with a practically unchanged repair-price schedule, the only change being coaster-brake fitting, now $0.50 to $7.50; Secretary Pattinson reports much good done last year.
- Winding-up proceedings against Brown & Smith, the Newport, Ky. lamp makers, expose Frank Brown's $18,500 advances to the firm; bookkeeper Thomas H. Collin and Brown's brother-in-law Louis Ducase testify before Master Commissioner Wolff at Cincinnati that early lamps failed but that a New York firm had ordered eight thousand of the improved lamp.
- Sales reports bear out the belief that coaster-brake machines are becoming the standard pattern, with the number of riders preferring fixed gears expected to dwindle as the coaster-brake becomes better known.
- Practically every repairer in Wilmington, Del. - among them T. C. Bradford, the McDaniels, Daniel Ross & Son and the H. W. Vandever Co. - signs a new repair tariff drawn up by the town's repairers' association, with prices such as $9 to $10 for a new hanger and enamelling and $6 for nickelling all parts.
- C. W. Carter of Lake street East, Minneapolis patents a penny-in-the-slot bicycle rack with four independent combination dials working safe-style pins, offered as an answer to the city's plague of bicycle thieves.
- H. W. Duret rode a motor bicycle in the English cyclists' corps manoeuvres for the attack and defence of London during Easter week, covering ninety-five miles on Friday and forty in pouring rain on Saturday, and was finally commandeered as despatch rider by the invading force's commander.
- Argues that the coming of motocycles will sharpen the demand for better roads, since the greater speed, weight and engine vibration of the motor-driven machine make inequalities of surface far more keenly felt.
- W. R. Holloway, United States Consul-General at St. Petersburg, reports that Russian-language catalogues printed in New York were refused admission, and explains the petition to Count Alexander Mouravieff, chief of the central committee of foreign censorship, with 1.60 rubles in revenue stamps, needed to circulate them.
- Under Sir Alfred Milner's proclamation, goods may enter the Transvaal and Orange River Colony only on a permit from the military governor at Pretoria or Johannesburg and with duty prepaid; violation means confiscation of the cycles plus a fine of up to five times the duty.
- Britain's March cycle trade figures - exports of £44,834 against £56,567 a year earlier, and imports of £26,452 against £16,790, the heaviest month since April 1900 - set the London papers asking whether another American invasion is under way.
- The United States Consul at Amsterdam reports Dutch distrust of American bicycles selling under $40, blaming slow six-week sundry deliveries, high freights, unpopular single-tube tires and American insistence on sight draft where European makers give three to six months' credit.
- Editorial arguing that price cutting can be stopped only by legal action of the kind taken by the Eclipse Mfg. Co., and commending the Bissell carpet sweeper company's practice of enjoining offenders rather than issuing stereotyped threats.
- Editorial urging dealers to inspect early-season machines in their own repair shops, since faults in newly assembled bicycles are magnified out of all proportion when every make is still on trial at the start of the season.
- Editorial noting that after a decade of warnings against high gearing, the 1901 catalogues show the great bulk of gears still between seventy and eighty inches, with seventy-sevens great favourites - evidence the anti-high-gear crusade has had no effect at all.
- Editorial arguing that the modern purchaser knows his book and resents kindergarten information, so the cycle salesman's task is harder, not easier: quality rather than quantity of talk is now what sells a machine.
- Editorial attacking the American Bicycle Company's 'fake bureau' for circulating a fraudulent endorsement by a mythical doctor and now a puff about King Edward and Lord Salisbury cycling at Marlborough House.
- James L. Pollitt, London manager of the Bissell Co., details three ways to maintain prices - stopping supply, the signed agreement, and his own licence system - resting on Mr. Justice Wills's ruling and a 1899 perpetual injunction granted by Mr. Justice Kekewich, and explains how to transmit the licence through catalogues, wrappers, invoices and trade announcements.
- A tour of the Badger Brass Mfg. Co.'s Kenosha, Wisconsin factory with secretary and superintendent G. H. Frost, describing the 20,000 square feet, 100-horsepower plant and 200 hands that turn out 1,000 Solar acetylene lamps a day through some 250 operations on 60 parts.
- Oscar Hedstrom, designer of the Hedstrom motor pacing tandems, is finishing a radically new chain-driven gasolene motor bicycle at the old Worcester Cycle Mfg. Co. factory at Middletown, Conn., understood to be building it for the Hendee Mfg. Co. of Springfield.
- The Waltham Mfg. Co.'s twelve-page 1901 Orient catalog, in transparent white covers lettered in purple and gold with each page thumb-indexed like a dictionary, is judged well off the beaten path of catalogs.
- The weekly trade register of fires, new stores and changes, including J. M. Allion's total loss at Fayette, O., new stores from Duluth to Ottawa, and changes such as Olmstead & Zeigle succeeding George N. Olmstead at Hartford and the Crescent Cycle and Automobile Co. succeeding the Frank Eveland Cycle Co. at Jersey City.
- A dealer at Jamaica, Long Island displays a pair of derelict ordinaries - a roadster and a light roadster, one with direct spokes, both without tires, saddles or pedals - as a reminder of how few high wheels are left.
- A bill passed by one house of the Connecticut Legislature makes chicken stealing a graver crime than bicycle theft, imposing a $100 fine and two years' imprisonment for raiding henneries.
- An English journal's Easter summary finds more lady riders, growing faith in the free wheel and a rapidly rising taste for the separate brake - the last marking an ever widening gap from American practice, where coaster and brake are inseparable.
- Irving S. Kent's home-built motor bicycle collapsed on the road at Hartford, Conn., throwing him on his head and leaving him unconscious for hours before he recovered.
- Complains that discontinued makes are rounded up, sold cheap to an enterprising merchant and heralded as the 'best ever' with much made of the price never having been cut, while not a word is said about manufacture having ceased.
- A London letter of 10 April reports record Easter crowds on the roads, motor tricycles and quads far outnumbering the half-dozen motor bicycles seen, the Chase brothers and Robert Todd among the converts, and the writer's own troubles with a water-cooled tricycle motor that cracked an inlet valve stem.
- Secretary D. J. Post shows that A. W. Gamage, Ltd.'s claimed victory over the Veeder Mfg. Co. was slight: quoting Justice Joyce's judgment, only the first of five cyclometer claims was revoked, the other four upheld and the invention held good subject matter for a patent.
- The Olds Motor Works of 54 Concord street, Detroit offers cycle dealers the $600 gasolene Oldsmobile runabout, claimed good for forty miles on a gallon and fitted for a detachable delivery box; its catalog carries nearly forty illustrations.
- 'Plugger Bill' Martin's suit against a Melbourne maker trading as the Martin Cycle Works for £97 15s. 3d. of prize commission - 32.5 per cent on £448 of wins, less £48 paid on account - is dismissed for want of jurisdiction because most of the races were won in Sydney.
- Contrasts the American firm that takes a single copy of its trade journal for the office with the German practice of letting the whole staff down to the foremen read it at the firm's cost, so that ideas return to the factory's profit.
- A veteran dealer tells a Bicycling World man of customers who demand free repairs - one wanting a two-year-old machine mended after a fall of his own making, another blaming soft tubing for a bent frame while his friend's rival make, cracked clean through, went back to the factory in secret.
- A retired carriage smith is quoted that the bicycle, the automobile, pneumatic tires and wire spokes have revolutionised carriage repairing - a whiffletree once had to be sawed out and worked by hand, where now they come ready fitted with their irons.
- Clifford E. Bown, a Youngstown, Ohio dealer, has built a gasolene motor bicycle in his own shop and, finding it so successful, will embark on manufacturing similar machines; George Boswell of Danielson, Conn. is perfecting a one-horsepower attachment to cost $100.
- Argues that a cycle maker, especially one in a country town far from any plating firm, can profitably do his own nickel plating and enamelling and take in work for the local ironmonger or saddler, since the trade needs no chemical training, only well understood rules.
- Reprints an English paper's recipe for re-enamelling a machine for a shilling - drop black in turps, copal varnish, gold size, emery cloth, potash and a hog hair brush - and predicts the amateur will end at the repairman's paying 50 per cent over the regular price to undo his work.
- An English firm markets a tire repair band, like the M. & W. band used here for years: a 4.5 by 2.5 inch sheet of thin fabric with a rubber film, tucked under the tire beads to support a cover gashed by a bottle or an old rent.
- Baggage Agent McWade of the Pennsylvania and Passenger Agent Edson J. Weeks of the Reading say their roads will keep carrying bicycles free this year, the new charge being confined to Southern lines; wheels carried last year were 100,000 fewer than at the height of the craze.
- The Planet Cycle Mfg. Co. of Toronto claims to be the pioneer of the Canadian cycle industry, the first to use the wood rim and the first to build a motor bicycle.
- The week's grants, including Russell G. Smith's bicycle holder (672,670), Hugh L. Warner's detachable pneumatic tire, Francis H. Richards's bicycle crank hanger, William Roche's sparking igniter for explosive engines and the L. S. Starrett Company's calipers and dividers, plus George W. Manson's bicycle frame design and Louis Lemiere's 'Sthenos' carburetter trademark.
- The week closing 16 April brought the heaviest cycle export manifest of the year, London taking 660 cases of bicycles worth $7,005, Havre 588 cases worth $10,456, Amsterdam 235 and Hamburg 227, with tidy parcels to Japan, Australia and the Philippines.
- Good rubber is said to bear bending through 180 degrees and five hours at 257 degrees Fahrenheit without surface cracks, while pure rubber with just enough sulphur to vulcanise it should stretch several times its length before breaking.
- A central New York State dealer, evidently short of work, advertises to clean, pack, re-enamel, re-nickel and respoke a bicycle, fit new grips and remove all dents for $5, with no charge unless the work satisfies.
- Applies Wendell Phillips's dictum - that the cost of a thing to the individual measures its usefulness to him, as with the price of bread in Paris or a $30 trip to Liverpool - to the popularisation of the bicycle.
- Frank I. Clark & Co. of Baltimore, left with a number of slightly damaged bicycles after a small fire and a great deal of water, advertised and sold the machines last week in order to adjust the insurance.
- Notes a belated change of heart toward the bicycle, quoting a writer who credits it with curing ailments, coaxing the sedentary outdoors, educating farmer and statesman to good roads and taking boys from the saloons; a New England traveller adds that two-thirds of new machines sold carry a coaster-brake.