The Bicycling World, Vol 43, No 6
Articles in this issue
- Charles A. Persons of Worcester, Mass., buys Emil Hafelfinger's motor-bicycle patent rights; the machine will be built as the Royal by the new Royal Motor Works of New York and Buffalo, with Hafelfinger superintending manufacture and full operation expected by July 1.
- Charles H. Lamson of Portland, Me., sells all rights and patents in his twenty-year-old luggage carrier to the Megquier & Jones Company of the same city, who will also market the reversible Peterson carrier.
- The New York Stock Exchange lists the Rubber Goods Manufacturing Company's securities, the preferred touching 90 and the common 36 before falling back, while American Bicycle Company stock stays stagnant at 32 and 7.
- F. P. Prial, long publisher of the Wheel and Cycling Trade Review before its absorption by the Bicycling World, has gone into the brokerage business in Wall Street.
- The Single Tube Automobile and Bicycle Tire Company's suit against F. H. Porter over the validity of the Tillinghast patent is reargued in the United States Circuit Court at Boston, F. F. Fish appearing for the tire company and E. S. Mansfield for the defendants, who built a tire in open court.
- Judge Townsend at New Haven continues to the April 1902 term the $75,000 suit of Brown Brothers, Limited, of London against George J. Capewell of Hartford over spoke-making machinery that the plaintiffs say never performed its mission.
- Paris letter: after the motocyclist Cormier was billed $50 to freight his quadricycle from Nice, the Minister of Public Works circularises the French railways that a passenger may carry luggage of any weight; also reports American makers gaining ground as the big French firms chase automobiles.
- Pinover Metallic Wheel Co. of Yonkers ($25,000), Pan-American Bicycle Livery Co. of Buffalo ($1,000) and the Lattimer Tire and Rubber Mfg. Co. of Chicago ($25,000) are incorporated.
- S. F. Heath of the Wisconsin Wheel Works writes that orders for Mitchell motor bicycles arrive daily and the firm expects to sell all it can produce.
- A repairer tells the Bicycling World man how his newly formed repair association's agreed price schedule ended the dickering and underbidding, and reproaches himself for the hundreds of dollars thrown away before it.
- General Manager Kirk of the Kirk & Snell factories, quoted by a Toledo paper, says 1901 trade discredits the "bicycle craze was on the wane" cry, with society people buying high-class wheels and cheap ones only fairly.
- At Toledo the First National Bank recovers a $2,333.33 judgment against F. J. Cheney in the Maumee Cycle Co. note case, on the fifth trial before Judge Morris; co-sureties Yost, Huber, Tillinghast and Jacquet were released.
- Testimony taken at Hartford in Bevin Brothers Manufacturing Company v. Starr Brothers Bell Company, both of East Hampton, over the patented shape of a bell for bicycles and automobiles, which the defence says is as old as door knobs.
- Consul Wyndham's report home tells British makers that Chicago's specialization, willingness to spend nothing on outward finish, aggressive selling and readiness to enlarge works beat British practice, whose worst fault is slow delivery.
- German cycle exports for the two months ending with February rose to 247 tons from 244, while cycle imports fell from 56 tons to 36.
- Deeds conveying the Pope Tube Company's four acres and buildings at Hartford to the Shelby Steel Tube Company of New Jersey are filed, carrying $189.50 in stamps.
- Editorial: energy and enterprise decide a dealer's fate, and the hundreds now making their last hopeless battle will pass away, leaving the live dealers relieved of harmful competition.
- Editorial on two English cycle papers at loggerheads over American competition, one urging Britons to imitate Yankee methods and the other insisting the trade is safe "at the top"; United States exports for the nine months to March exceeded imports by $521,000,000.
- Editorial arguing the motor will no more drive out the pedal bicycle than the telephone killed the telegraph, citing a prominent Philadelphia dealer who says the sight of a motor vehicle stirs lean-pursed spectators to buy bicycles.
- Editorial: buyers are taking chainless gears, coaster brakes and cushion frames and paying up to $50, so the dealers who kept harping on the best bicycles rather than cheap ones are the ones now profiting.
- Editorial: the motocycle cannot be slapped together or pushed along by the pedals, so it will force intelligent workmanship and lift thinking workmen out of the rut and above their fellows.
- Editorial: with uniform repair prices in force, competition shifts from underbidding to reputation, facilities and skill, one man excelling in brazing, another in machine work, a third on tires.
- Editorial: dealers report drop-frame sales in some cases running as large as diamond frames, a hopeful sign that women are taking up the pastime again, and a worry for makers who prepared little for it.
- On the long-stalled standardization of cycle bolt and nut threads: every maker fixes his own sizes, so a broken part means a duplicate from the original factory, as agricultural machinery once did before makers' conventions settled standards.
- The Persons Manufacturing Company of Worcester, Mass., brings out an illustrated short-pommel, broad-seat saddle with an unusual spring, designed for coaster-brake bicycles and motocycles where the rider's weight rests in the saddle.
- A representative of the American Spoke and Nipple Company of Torrington, Conn., reduces to junk the spoke-making machinery of the Lamb factory at Chicopee Falls, valued at $25,000 to $50,000 — the sixth plant he has stripped since September.
- Lieutenant-Colonel Crompton tells the Cycle Engineers' Institute at Birmingham that of his twenty-two cycle-mounted electrical engineers' machines in South Africa every spare 9-inch crank was used up, running 80 and 84 gears over veldt and deep sand.
- With the Supreme Court having voided the 10-cent tax on export bills of lading, the government will consider refund claims for stamps of $2 face value or more presented within two years of purchase.
- Edward Smith, partner of the defaulter Frank M. Brown in the bicycle lamp business, moves in the Campbell Court at Newport, Ky., for a sale of the receiver-held plant now that the German National Bank's claim is settled.
- London letter: magistrates rule that a motocycle at rest with its plug removed is not a light locomotive and may be left unattended, though the police may fall back on obstruction charges; also on demand for 2¾-horsepower motors and Coventry's retreat from motocycle building.
- A perpetual invoice-filing system — a loose-leaf binder with a manila leaf for each creditor and monthly totals carried to the purchase ledger — replaces the laborious scrapbook-and-journal method of recording purchases.
- The Appellate Division, per Justice Rumsey, affirms Samuel Brown's nuisance judgment against the Metropolitan Street Railway after his front wheel dropped into a Broadway cable slot near Canal street widened to nearly two inches.
- Soldering up a dent in an undamaged tube is excusable, but covering with solder a tube weakened by a careless sweep of the file near a joint and sending the work out as sound is little short of criminal.
- Philadelphia riders have taken to coaster brakes, and bicycle stores, repair shops and hardware dealers alike are fitting complete rear wheels for $5.50 and $5.75, much of the built-up work of sloppy description.
- An Alabama court holds it error to instruct that under all "ordinary circumstances" a bicyclist must stop, look and listen like a pedestrian, where the defendant's flagman had signalled the plaintiff to cross the tracks.
- The forward-turned saddle post, thought an ephemeral fad six years ago, has outlasted the racing-bred backward post and the absurdly extended version, and will remain while the present frame form lasts.
- An Eastern tradesman writes that supply houses sell built-up coaster-brake wheels for as little as $5, paying 15 cents to spoke a wheel and $1.50 to $2.50 to assemble a frame and fork ready for enamelling.
- An English repairer, quoted from a contemporary, lists five "stupidities of construction" — low chain-wheel shrouds, dished rear sprockets, irreversible block chains, pedal spindles with no locking nut, and hubs that require stripping a free-wheel clutch to replace one spoke.
- A new india rubber substitute from Sweden made of varnished Japanese rice paper pressed in layers and faced with Japanese cork, said to be elastic, light and air and water proof.
- Dealers and repairers complain that present-day bicycles are too good and never wear out, and with the yearly-model fashion gone only real improvements — not replacement demand — will bring the trade business.
- Frank Wood writes that the Indiana Chain Co. of Indianapolis has both a new chain and the catch phrase "Every link is right," which it wants lodged in every chain man's brain.
- The G & J Tire Co. of Indianapolis issues a catalogue whose cover is a symphony in colors, with a dozen wayside scenes inside, spoiled only by the compiler's use of the term "bike."
- The repair price list just adopted by the Toronto Cycle Board of Trade, covering frame, wheel, hanger, chain, handle bar, brake, tire, overhauling, enamelling, crating and guard work, and running a trifle below United States charges.
- Despite cheaper aluminum and improved manufacture, only one aluminum bicycle is still being made; the rest had a very ephemeral existence and have passed away.
- The repairman sees what designers never do — which company's cranks are soft, whose pedals work loose, where a machine gives way at the forks — and learns the gauge of tube, the pinning and the quality of brazing behind each maker's outward finish.
- The Bridgeport Gun Implement Co. offers an assortment of Record pedals, taken over when it purchased the Record patents and material, at a price meant to move them quickly.
- The week's fires, new stores and changes: R. G. Hill's entire stock destroyed at Fairmont, Neb.; new shops from Akron, N. Y. and Bay City, Mich. to Two Harbors, Minn.; Claude Miller removes from Dundee to Tyrone and the N. W. Tarbell Bicycle Company to 241 Main street, Nashua.
- Cycle shipments for the week ended April 30, headed by Rotterdam with 310 cases of bicycles ($6,453), Hamburg 214 ($5,578), London 202, Havre 156, Stockholm 140 and Moscow 100, with Holland, Denmark, Sweden and the West Indies all buying well.
- A German acetylene lamp manufacturer is collecting material on making interchangeable burners, since lamps are often discarded when a maker fails or changes his pattern and no fitting burner can be had.
- A dealer whose stock of a good-selling sundry runs out should borrow from a well-stocked fellow dealer at a slight advance over wholesale to cover freight and bookkeeping, rather than confess his predicament to a customer.
- An emery wheel that works badly may work perfectly at a different speed, so experimenting with speed is better practice than charging the failure to the wheel itself.
- The Supreme Court of Massachusetts holds that a watch is not "necessary wearing apparel" exempt from execution, and compels a bankrupt who sought to keep his to disgorge it.
- Claims allowed include Frank W. Weston's bifurcated garment, John Hubbard's spirally wound pneumatic tire, Henry G. Tassell's vaporizing device, Frank S. Huber's seat attachment, Edward N. Dickerson's multi-cylinder motocycle, William G. Schaeffer's back-pedalling brake and Raoul Turr's acetylene lamp.
- A poor tire may give a traction efficiency of only 42 per cent against upward of 70 per cent for a really good one, so the extra cost of a first-class tire is well worth paying.