The Bicycling World, Vol 43, No 5
Articles in this issue
- The A. F. Shapleigh Hardware Co. of St. Louis passes on July 1 to the Norvell-Shapleigh Hardware Co., capital raised from $500,000 to $1,000,000, with Saunders Norvell and other men from the rival Simmons Hardware Co. as officers; the bicycle department is to be kept up.
- The Glines Liquid Rubber Co. of Providence, R. I., abandons tire-fluid manufacture, acknowledges the validity of the Buffalo Specialty Mfg. Co.'s "Neverleak" patents and withdraws from the combination formed to fight them.
- The Sanger Handle Bar and Plating Co. of Milwaukee, petitioned into bankruptcy the previous week, shows liabilities of $50,000, but goodwill toward the Sanger people may let the business continue.
- The Doughty bill requiring lamps on all rubber-tired vehicles in New York State passed the Assembly but was strangled in Senate committee, Senators Fetter and Armstrong being blamed for its death.
- Trustees of the old Liberty Cycle Co. of Bridgeport, Conn., distributed $1,024.53 against general claims totalling $204,904.85.
- The National Cycle and Automobile Co. of Toronto, the American Bicycle Co.'s Canadian annex, settled out of court with John Patterson, J. J. Scott and J. V. Teetzel of Hamilton, Ont., taking $4,650 on a claim of $14,975 over the Hamilton factory agreement.
- United States cycle exports for March 1901 totalled $342,569 against $412,486 a year earlier, France and the United Kingdom buying heavily while Germany and Canada continued to fall away; a full table gives nine-month figures by country.
- The M. Seward & Son Co. of New Haven, Conn., drop-forging makers, have added new capital and bought a 400-foot site for a factory twice the size of the present one.
- The trade at Christchurch, New Zealand, so welcomed the failure of the town's chief price cutter that they celebrated with a champagne banquet.
- The Bevin Bros. Mfg. Co. of Easthampton, Conn., are running their plant nights to keep pace with orders for bells and other sundries.
- E. R. Wagner, formerly with the C. J. Smith & Sons Co., has organized the E. R. Wagner Co. of Milwaukee to make baby-carriage parts, toy bicycles and sheet-metal stampings.
- London letter of April 17: unbroken bad weather has cost the British motocycle trade its Easter business, forcing bankruptcy on firms compelled to take delivery, while the Ariel Co., Ltd., with its front-mounted motor tricycle, is the one English firm doing really well.
- F. A. Wilmot of the Wilmot & Hobbs Mfg. Co., president of the Manufacturers' Association of Bridgeport, Conn., writes to Congressman J. W. Babcock of Wisconsin urging that iron ore, pig iron, steel billets and ingots, coal and coke be put on the free list, arguing the steel trust is no longer an "infant industry."
- The German Dealers' Association has set October for its show in the Crystal Palace at Leipzig; finished foreign bicycles may be exhibited, but the managers choose who may enter and few American articles are expected to be admitted.
- C. C. King writes from Paris that English-language catalogues are of little use to Continental buyers, who want printed matter, correspondence and shipping details in their own languages.
- The plant of the Lowell Model Co. of Lowell, Mass., known in the cycle trade for its bicycle motors, was destroyed by fire on Saturday.
- Editorial arguing that cycling's "slump" exists only by comparison with the boom of 1894-96, and that the trade should ignore both and judge the bicycle on its own standing as a business and pleasure vehicle.
- Editorial on the Chicago mail-order houses now pushing eastward with $11.75 machines and "rider agent" schemes, warning that the 100,000 to 200,000 bicycles they have to place come straight out of the country dealer's earnings.
- Editorial backing Frank A. Wilmot and the Bridgeport Manufacturers' Association against the billion-dollar steel trust, noting that the 45 per cent bicycle duty never kept out the English machine and that grown industries have no need of tariff milk bottles.
- Editorial on slow deliveries of the "three C's" — chainless, coaster-brake and above all cushion frame — which have lagged behind dealers' orders, with makers promising no further trouble after mid-month.
- Editorial likening the trade to a toper waking from a debauch: dealers now decline sales that show no profit, buyers accept the price without objection, and no excuse for price cutting remains.
- Owen & Moore of Clarksville, Tenn., answer mail-order competition by advertising a $12 bicycle "better than that sold by a mail-order house at $12.98 — and you pay no express charges on ours" alongside their high grade.
- A traveller signing "G. D. R." describes how American soldiers' wheels seeded the bicycle trade in Japan, the Philippines and Hawaii, with Iloilo, Manila, Honolulu and Nagasaki as distributing centres and Filipino prisoners breaking stone to build ridable roads; natives, not resident Americans, are the main buyers.
- The automatic locking bicycle rack invented by C. W. Carter of Minneapolis works on the principle of a combination safe, with four tumbler wheels, ten thousand combinations, nine basic patents and the distinction of setting its combination when last locked.
- The Reading (Pa.) Automobile and Gear Co.'s suit against Edward E. Ziegler of Philadelphia over the Wyoma coaster-brake patents stands, the Wyoma people flatly denying Ziegler's lawyer's claim that a counter suit covering the E. Z. brake had been filed against them.
- The Indiana Chain Co. of Indianapolis, now delivering its guaranteed-not-to-budge chain in quantity, is clearing chains of previous patterns at cut prices.
- Papers are about to be executed for manufacturing Emil Hafelfinger's motor bicycle, the sensation of the last New York Cycle Show, on a considerable scale; the inventor has meanwhile added an automatic lubricator carrying its oil in the top tube.
- Commissioner Yerkes promulgates the Supreme Court's ruling in United States vs. Fairbanks that a stamp tax on a foreign bill of lading is a tax on exports and unconstitutional, so collectors will no longer require stamps under the act of June 13, 1898.
- A dealer who put a few second-hand wheels in his window marked low saw them snapped up one at a time by bargain hunters.
- Recollections of the days after the safety appeared, when factories hammered and chopped their scrap to hide their mistakes; at one iron works a boatload of bicycle-factory refuse yielded complete sets of fittings from which workmen had half a dozen machines built up, one of which broke through a faulty forging.
- Praise for the E. R. Thomas Motor Co., whose array of unsolicited testimony printed in this issue is credited with supplying backbone to the whole motor bicycle trade, not merely to the Thomas interests.
- Governor Odell has signed the Doughty "Automobile bill," whose sweeping definition of "carriage" frees motocycles to use any New York street, park or parkway; automobiles must carry bells, horns, brakes and lamps, register with the Secretary of State and keep to eight miles an hour in built-up sections.
- Weekly trade register of embarrassments, fires, new stores and changes, including James J. Casey's bankruptcy at Worcester, Mass., a $200 fire at Hoffman & Robinson's in Newark, N. Y., and the sale of the Hampshire Cycle Co. of Northampton, Mass., to W. H. Kimball.
- Paris letter on the alcohol trials run from Paris to Roubaix, where Cormier nursed a De Dion quad over 172 miles on 7 litres 250 of carburetted alcohol for less than $1, against Osmont's 22 litres 450 in six hours and a Werner tandem's 10 1/2 litres in eleven; also the new loose yellow-leather motocycling costume.
- Lincoln Holland of Worcester, Mass., twenty years in the trade, advertises that he is the only dealer in the city selling but one make of wheel, having ridden 5,824 miles in 1898 and turned out 2,700 repair jobs in 1900.
- A practical man on shop jigs: some men are natural schemers of them and few such devices are ever heard of outside their own works, but reliance on gauges, templets and jigs dulls the workman's sense of personal responsibility, and an inaccurate jig is worse than none.
- Two engravings of a motor tricycle whose forecarriage converts at will between a passenger seat and a luggage carrier.
- California's last legislature made bicycle stealing a felony, and Henry Mitchell, an Oakland bricklayer arrested for taking a wheel from a rack in front of a business house, is to be the first prosecuted under it on a charge of grand larceny.
- Bicycle stores and repair shops at Westfield, Mass., will close every evening except Monday and Saturday under an agreement reached between the dealers and the retail clerks' union.
- On the perennial difficulty of fastening rubber tires: modern wiring and vulcanizing to the rim merely revive old practice, as with the English "Indestructible" tire of 1881, moulded into the rim and steam-vulcanized, and a partner's four-part metallic fixed tire screwed to the rim of the "Portable" bicycle.
- The Flint, Eddy & American Trading Co. of New York are opening a Durban, Natal, branch under J. T. Paterson to work South Africa, and ask that catalogues be sent to their city house marked "South African Department."
- Claims from eight newly issued patents, among them Frank E. Black's combined hobby horse and tricycle, Charles O. Barnes's back-pedalling brake, Pardon W. Tillinghast's bicycle saddle, Abi Mayerson's bicycle frame and Abraham Bath's sparking igniter for explosive engines.
- A new puncture-proof tire lays little scale-like pieces of untanned parchment-like leather between two thin layers of cotton ribbon and sets the protector between cover and air tube; test cycles were ridden over nails and glass without injury to the tube.
- A patent taken out at Berlin drives the front wheel from the pedal crank shaft by elastic shafts run through the tubing of the frame and set in motion by a worm wheel on the crank axle.
- Cycle export shipments for the week closed April 23, led by Hamburg with 598 cases of bicycles at $4,180, London with 271 cases and $6,653 of material, Havre with 150 cases and British Australia with 101; Uruguay's 62 cases were unusually large.
- The head of a large Connecticut hardware house admits his trade has only just begun to realise the value of its show windows, which the writer holds out as hope that the cycle dealer may wake up to his own window opportunities.
- A foreign writer traces chain trouble to lengthening pitch caused by wear at the joints, showing that ordinary pins carry pressures many times the 500 pounds per square inch a journal bearing can stand.
- India rubber cultivation at Para needs little capital once the land is bought: a hectare carries at least twenty-four full-grown trees yielding about four kilogrammes each, and plantations are either worked by hired labor or the trees hired out on condition the rubber is sold back to the owner.