The Bicycling World, Vol 52, No 15
Articles in this issue
- The Fisk Rubber Company of Chicopee Falls, Mass., complains to the Interstate Commerce Commission that the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, Chicago & North Western, Great Northern, Missouri Pacific and a dozen other western roads classify bicycle and vehicle rubber tires as first-class material, charging up to two and a half times that rate and more than express to the same points.
- The Minneapolis Cycle Trade Association chose S. Stevenson president, W. Edwards vice-president, O. Fenstermacher treasurer and E. H. Hammer secretary, and named a committee to urge the city clerk to have cyclepath tags ready before the riding season opens.
- The Wagner Motor Cycle Co. of St. Paul has secured space at the A. C. A. Show in the Sixty-ninth Regiment Armory to stage its improved 1906 model, with New York representative Harry S. Lyons in charge.
- The National Cycle Trade Association's Advisory Committee, which directs the "Ride a Bicycle Campaign," will meet at 10.30 a. m. on the 16th inst. at the Victoria Hotel, New York.
- George Breeze of the Breeze Motor Co., Newark, N. J., has invented a two-cycle motor designed specially for motorcycles, which he believes will permit machines weighing 75 pounds or less.
- Noah H. Slee, president of 3-in-One, has been elected a member of the New York Chamber of Commerce.
- The Coolidge Cycle Company of Rutland, Vt., has sold out to Howley Bros.
- The New Departure Mfg. Co.'s coaster-brake infringement suits against two Eastern jobbers are crippled by its own lapse: neither the brakes nor their boxes ever bore patent numbers or the word "Patented" as the law requires, so even a judgment would collect neither royalty nor damages.
- E. M. Moss, a dealer in bicycles and sporting goods at Hopkinsville, Ky., has filed a petition in bankruptcy, with liabilities of $3,600 against resources claimed to aggregate $5,000.
- Electric-automobile tests using a graphic recording meter, run on Fifth avenue from Sixtieth to 110th street and on eight graded courses of asphalt, macadam and Belgian block, found that warm softened asphalt demands at least 40 per cent more energy than the same pavement cold, and that pneumatic tires absorb 15 per cent more power than solid on smooth roads but are far better on rough.
- The 1906 Armac, from the Armac Motor Co. formerly of St. Paul and now of Chicago, develops 3 horse-power on brake test from a 3 by 3 1/4 inch one-piece cylinder and makes the Shelby-tube top bar of its loop frame the gasolene tank; equipment includes G & J tires, a Breeze carburetter and Bowden wire grip control.
- A battery in its last stages will start a motorcycle readily and run it a short distance, then misfire and stop — symptoms so like a failure of the gasolene supply that riders needlessly take the carburetter to pieces.
- Leader adopting an accessory maker's phrase "too safe to be cheap" as a slogan for the whole industry, arguing that the price cutter reaps one or two forced harvests and then finds his cheapened product has destroyed his own market.
- Leader holding that the Associated Cycling Clubs' midnight "run" vindicated the protests of the New York Motorcycle Club and the Federation of American Motorcyclists, since machines ran the public roads at 25 to 35 miles an hour in the dark, and warning motorcyclists to suppress such races before public outcry shifts from motor cars to them.
- Fred T. Wanner of the National Athletic Club won the Century Road Club of America's New Year's race from Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, to Coney Island and return in 45 minutes 30 seconds from seventy-six starters; Fred E. Mommer took the year's first puncture and beat Seeley for the first century, and Frank Eifler cut the Bedford Rest to Valley Stream record to 37 minutes 30 seconds.
- A London print reports that Arthur Vanderstuyft, the Belgian six-day rider, was offered $500 in cash and "free naturalization" to remain in America, and that Cyrus L. Hollister's two alleged wives came to claim him during the closing days of the race and fought with hatpins.
- Alexander McLean says he can get most of the American riders to enter a Boston six-day race, to be followed by regular winter meets, and will apply this week to the company operating the Park Square Roller Skating Rink for permission to build the track.
- St. Louis, Mo., has divorced motorcycles from automobiles: from the 1st inst. the license fee falls from $10 to $2 and the tag from 12 by 6 inches to 3 1/2 by 3 1/2 inches.
- Charles A. Sherwood of the New York Athletic Club, middle distance amateur champion of America, meets Edward Rupprecht in a best two-of-three home trainer match race at the Bay View Wheelmen's entertainment in Newark, N. J., on the 10th inst.
- Iver Lawson, Floyd McFarland and William E. Samuelson are in Australia racing against the European cracks Rutt and Mayer; at a Sydney meet before the Austral, Lawson and McFarland finished first and second in all three scratch races they entered.
- Charles H. Hall has been elected president of the Chicago Motorcycle Club, with Dr. S. W. Fahrney vice-president, Irving R. Hall secretary, George H. Gardner treasurer and Charles W. Van Sickle captain.
- The Thirsty Club of Denver, Col., decided at its annual meeting to hold a bicycle road race in 1906, the date set being February 7.
- At the eighteenth annual Associated Cycling Clubs midnight New Year's run to Yonkers and Tarrytown, John J. Forsythe, P. E. Bourget and Martin Kessler were protested for taking motor pace, A. Kreuder led the motorcyclists into Yonkers in 27 minutes, and a bread-wagon driver upset by unmuffled machines drew a pearl-handled revolver until Horenburger produced a more business-like gun.
- W. F. Stephens, attorney-at-law, traces from Taylor vs. Godwin (1879) the rule that a bicycle is a carriage in law, and reviews sidewalk riding, car-track contributory negligence, wheels left in the street, the keep-to-the-right rule, Sunday travel and liability for frightened horses.
- Photographs of the "trap" refuted the police witnesses at the perjury trial of a London Automobile Association bicycle scout, showing that the man in the road had passed the point sworn to by thirty yards.
- The McKeesport (Pa.) Cyclers turned down $3,500 offered by a local furniture concern for the lease of the second floor of the Donovan Building, which the club had recently fitted up elaborately.
- The New York division of the Century Road Club of America will hold its annual ball on March 8, with the Bedell brothers of Newark, runners up in the recent six-day race, expected to give a home trainer exhibition.
- A veteran cyclist explains why talk of bicycles always makes him think of typewriters, telling how he and colleagues in a newspaper office tied a string to a man's space bar and jerked it from across the aisle until he swore the machine had moved by itself.
- C. F. Axtell of Lodi, Cal., has averaged about 1,000 miles a month since May 1 on a Yale-California motor bicycle, covering a 36-mile mail route daily without a failure or a penny of repairs — evidence against the Fourth Assistant Postmaster General's order striking at bicycles and motorcycles.
- A writer in Cycling recalls hiding under the massage board while "Dr. Dope" sold the rider Kidonni a spoonful of quinine as the "famous American green dope"; Kidonni won his pursuit match against Lappini in record time and returned to buy more at an exorbitant price.
- S. Cooper beat George Wheeler by seven ballots for the presidency of the Bayonne Wheelmen of Bayonne, N. J., the only contested office; Valentine Bernhardt, E. T. Jones and John Barb were elected unanimously.
- Fred Schudt of the Standard Wheeling Club of Buffalo took the two mile lap race with 46 points at the Seventy-fourth Regiment Armory games, beating W. W. Whitelock, who was hissed by part of the crowd; Charles McCracken won the one mile handicap from 20 yards after Whitelock was crowded out and struck a post.
- The Melbourne Bicycle Club, Druids Gala, Eight Hour Fete, A. N. A., Sydney Thousand and Adelaide Fete committees have agreed on conditions for engaging imported cracks, capping appearance money at about $6 per programme for first-class riders to end cut-throat bidding.
- Charles H. Holmes of Portsmouth, N. H., sues that city for $1,000 after running into an unguarded and unlighted sewer trench in Stark street, demolishing his motorcycle and losing several weeks' work.
- The authorities of a Scottish rural community have ordered the mail carrier, who covers twelve and more miles of route by bicycle on weekdays, to leave his wheel up and walk on Sundays.
- On the short circuit that defies every test: high tension current passes unseen through apparently sound insulation on the secondary leads, so the only practical way to find the leak is to run the machine slowly on the stand in a darkened room and watch for the intermittent spark.
- Peter Wollenschlager's mid-winter weekly runs, open to all cyclists, start from Fourteenth street and Eighth avenue, Manhattan, at 8 p. m. every Tuesday — correcting the Fourth street rendezvous printed last week.
- Alfred Brodbeck, physical director of the Cincinnati Gymnasium, denies that hard training bursts blood vessels, citing Dr. George L. Meylan's study of 152 Columbia varsity oarsmen over forty-one years in which no death was traceable to over-exertion and life expectancy ran five years above the average man's.
- The Vicar of St. Peter's, Brockley, Kent, tells the Scottish Cyclist he was once told to "pull up his socks" by an old lady and nearly killed the most holy spinster in his parish while learning to ride, but calls the bicycle democratic, health-giving and the death of the chaperon.
- A London doctor who dreads hills took a train to a station beyond "Little Brick Hill" to avoid it on the way home, realising only as he alighted that he could have ridden down it.
- Despite protests from "one hundred business girls" and the advocacy of Councilmen Elliott and Donalson, Oakland, Cal., has passed an ordinance prohibiting bicycle riding on its sidewalks.
- E. James, on a single cylinder 3 1/2 h. p. Brown weighing 170 pounds, won the Rand Cup in the Dunlop Reliability Contest — 572 miles from Melbourne to Sydney in five stages — as the only rider to survive with a perfect score over the 1 in 6 gradient of Razor Back Hill.
- Professor Griffiths of Cardiff University revives the sideslip question, suggesting that driving and braking the front wheel while steering with the rear would overcome it, despite the Cyclists' Touring Club's $2,000 anti-side-slip prize trials.
- Three grants with claims: 807,749, a seat for velocipedes to Richard G. Ledig of Philadelphia, assignor to August Mecky; 807,479, a carburetter to Julius H. Mason of Duncan Falls, Ohio; and 807,715, a coaster brake to Claud D. Beverly of Evansville, Ind.
- A joke from Tit Bits: a rider of ten years' frosty-weather experience admits to just one trifling accident — a broken leg, belonging to the man who was teaching him to ride.
- A London porter has found a new use for the cycle, keeping a lookout for luggage-laden cabs, following them to their destination and offering to help carry the luggage indoors.