The Bicycling World, Vol 52, No 10
Articles in this issue
- The bottom bracket litigation was settled out of court at a Hartford conference on 21 November: makers will pay the Pope Mfg. Co. a small fixed royalty on every bicycle for five years, and the Fauber and Seyfang patents pass to Pope, which waives all claims to back royalty.
- Out of the Hartford settlement grew the Cycle Manufacturers' Association, with W. H. Crosby temporary chairman and A. L. Pope temporary secretary; Colonel George Pope, Harry Walburg and F. E. Southard will draft the constitution for a meeting at the Auditorium Annex, Chicago, on 11 December.
- E. J. Lobdell of the wood rim pool reports his French factory now supplies 56 per cent of that country's rims against 6 per cent four years ago, and he contemplates shipping machinery from America to set up a German plant.
- Only the Hendee Mfg. Co. and the American Motor Co. have engaged space at the Automobile Club of America's 13-20 January show in the 69th Regiment Armory; no motorcycles will be exhibited at the rival Madison Square Garden show.
- Trade notes: W. H. Wild of Lindenhurst, L. I., has discontinued bicycles, and T. J. Northway of Rochester, N. Y., suffered a fire with a loss of about $1,000.
- Argues that the most serious business failure is a man's loss of confidence in his own situation, citing a dealer who said that had he known how much adversity a man can stand he would have been on Easy Street years earlier.
- The Fabrique Nationale d'Armes de Guerre of Herstal, Belgium, declared a 15 per cent dividend against 8 per cent last year on gross profits of $455,000, which helps explain why American bicycles no longer reach the Continent in quantity.
- The Persons Mfg. Co. of Worcester, Mass., is now regularly marketing thirty-inch oak-tanned leather luggage straps with nickel-plated buckles and stitched connections, devised as a substitute for the bird-cage wire carrier.
- A writer in Cycling objects to agents who keep a phonograph going all day, and prints a comic verse of a customer's conversation with the boss drowned by "Tooroodle boo!" and "Burr-urr! Whee!"
- Reflects that in an age of machine-made goods with identical exteriors, buyers judge by who makes a thing rather than by the article itself, as no one thinks of a skyscraper's buried foundation.
- Menelik, King of the Abyssinians, has ordered several bicycles from a Milan firm and intends to mount his escort on two wheels instead of four feet, which may make Abyssinia a market for the bicycle.
- The Automobile Club of America is drafting a new New York motor vehicle measure; the Federation of American Motorcyclists, which won exemption from registration fees and tags under the present law, has moved to safeguard power-driven cycles again.
- Great Britain exported 5,152 bicycles valued at £33,734 in October, plus £49,171 of parts; the ten months to October totalled 37,532 cycles and an aggregate £768,651 against £608,327 in 1904.
- Councilman Grant has introduced an ordinance cutting St. Louis's extortionate $10 annual motorcycle licence fee to $3; bicycles are taxed only $1, and then only when the tax is collected at all.
- W. J. Murray and T. Russell, for the Canada Cycle and Motor Company, appeared before the Canadian Tariff Commission to argue for free admission of steel balls, which now pay a 30 per cent duty.
- From 1 January Pennsylvania will charge resident and non-resident motorcyclists $3 a year, issuing five-inch numbered tags through the State Highway Department and revoking a second offender's road rights for six months; the Attorney-General holds the act covers motorcycles, and all fourteen sections are printed in full.
- Leader arguing the half-formed association would justify the whole bottom bracket litigation, calling for action rather than figureheads, honorary officers and complacent post mortems, and urging that makers of cycle wares other than complete bicycles be admitted.
- Leader predicting that within a year or two the two-cycle motor will be universal on motorcycles, citing halved vibration, a lighter flywheel, less strain on gear, frame and tires, and the development work already done in automobile and motor boat practice.
- B. A. Swenson of Providence, R. I., writes that he sold three motorcycles in 1903, seventeen last year and forty-seven to 16 November this year, by riding one himself, letting anyone try it, hiring machines at $3.50 a day and conducting Sunday runs from his store.
- Thomas W. Davis of Peoria, Ill., aged seventy-eight, reports 115,712 miles since his first ride on a 48-inch ordinary, chains geared to 63 lasting about 11,000 miles, and a Persons-Muller saddle ridden over 90,000 miles.
- A new vaudeville and circus turn shown abroad combines the old loop-the-loop with "ride the wheel," the latest of the hair-raising cycle stunts.
- Arthur E. Rhodes of the Century Road Club, nearly 42 and father of four, won the twenty-five-mile Coney Island Cycle Path Handicap on Thanksgiving morning off six minutes in 1:21:35, riding a Columbia chainless geared to 88; C. J. Ericson and Peter J. Baum followed a fifth of a second apart, and Charles A. Sherwood took the time prize in 1:16:35.
- Rain left the loam-dressed mile of Ocean Parkway too slippery, so the Brooklyn Motorcycle Club's 25-mile handicap was put off to Saturday morning; Oscar Hedstrom on a two-cylinder Indian and J. P. Bruyere on a Curtiss are the scratch men among 25 entries.
- Preview of the thirteenth Madison Square Garden six-day race, to be started by John J. McGraw: sixteen teams including Trousselier-Decaup, Gougoltz-Vanoni, Vanderstuyft-Stol, Doerflinger-Dussot and Root-Fogler, with a history of the race since Plugger Bill Martin's 1891 win, the new five-lap repair rule, and the full team list.
- Arthur B. Ennis of Brooklyn Headquarters won the first New York police motorcycle championship over ten miles of the Coney Island cycle paths in 15:00 4-5; Benjamin Mallon finished first in 14:28 but was disqualified for a borrowed racing machine, as was "Mile-a-Minute" Charles M. Murphy.
- Explains how crude rubber is washed, rolled, dried and cured with sulphur, and why repeated attempts to vulcanize a patch carry the surrounding rubber toward the hard vulcanite stage and ruin the tube or shoe.
- An ex-rider notes that today's cyclists are the moderate survivors of the boom, contrasts the goose-neck scorcher with the sedate mud-guard and brake class, and recalls racing the newly finished Hudson County Boulevard and the steep Broadway pitch at Tarrytown ten years ago.
- "Jock" in the Scottish Cyclist on economical touring: village inns at two shillings for bed and breakfast, the midday meal as the economist's chief difficulty, a low opinion of temperance hotels, a couple who carry a cooking outfit on their tandem, and the C. T. C. handbook's useless discount system.
- George Thoreakos, a Greek member of the Brower Wheelmen, won the club's thirty-mile Thanksgiving road race from Bedford Rest to Valley Stream off 12 minutes in 2:41:00 over rain-cut frozen roads; George Wiley of Syracuse took time honours in 2:24:00 after the clerk of the course failed to call the other scratch men to the mark.
- The Dunlop Tire Co.'s 165-mile Warrnambool to Melbourne road race feeds its riders from stations along the route: satchels of bananas, mandarins, chocolate, raisins, celery and beef sausages at Camperdown, egg flip at Winchelsea and Bovril at Werribee.
- Bicycle events dominated the opening Seventy-fourth Regiment games at the Buffalo Armory on 25 November, the first since the Buffalo Cyclists' Union strike ended; Otto Menge won the novice in 2:32, Edward Delling the mile open in 2:31 3-5 and Fred Schudt the two-mile handicap in 4:38 2-5.
- George Cameron of the 8th Regiment Athletic Association won the two-mile handicap from scratch in 5:04 on a slippery twelve-lap floor, after an official stopped riders sprinkling rosin on the boards; Vanden Dries was second and Lediard third.
- P. E. Barczih came from scratch to win the one-mile handicap closed to members of the Fourteenth Regiment at their Brooklyn armory in 2:45 4-5, from Thomas Rowand (30 seconds) and C. Bowman (15 seconds).
- Weekly patent list with claims, including resilient tires to William F. Beasley of Plymouth, N. C., and Charles L. Ireson of Boston, Olin M. Bigger's multi-tube pneumatic tire, Emil F. Kaiser's bicycle lock and Adolf Vogt's power regulator for two-stroke explosion engines.