The Bicycling World, Vol 52, No 16
Articles in this issue
- The Eastern Freight Association Committee has promised that from 1 February rubber tires will move at third-class instead of first-class rates east of the Mississippi and north of Washington, D. C.; the Fisk Rubber Co.'s Interstate Commerce Commission complaint against the Western railroads is expected to force similar cuts.
- Six motorcycle exhibits are set for the Automobile Club's show at the Sixty-ninth Regiment Armory - Indian, Marsh, Curtiss, Thoroughbred, Wagner and Thor - while the Thor and the Yale-California go to the Madison Square Garden show.
- Special Agent Burrill of the U. S. Department of Commerce and Labor writes from Shanghai that Humber, Rover and Rudge-Whitworth machines outsell Columbia, Rambler, Pierce, Cleveland and Westfield because Chinese buyers want straight bars, spring brakes and a free wheel, and that American makers should wrap machines in cloth rather than paper to prevent rust.
- Leavitt & Bill, one of the important Pacific coast jobbing houses, dissolved partnership on the 1st inst.; J. W. Leavitt retains the San Francisco business and J. T. Bill takes charge at Los Angeles.
- The Simmons Hardware Co. of St. Louis has bought the stock of the Hockaday Hardware Co. of Wichita, Kansas, reorganizing under E. C. Simmons, W. D. Simmons, F. E. Allyn, Harry F. Gee and E. W. Martin, with Allyn as local manager; both houses job bicycles.
- Charles S. Hurst of Worcester, Mass., a bicycle dealer of many years, has incorporated as the Hurst Sporting Goods Co. with $10,000 capital, Albert E. Hurst as president, C. S. Hurst treasurer and A. C. Twombly clerk.
- The Cycle Manufacturers' Association meeting fixed for February 7 is now likely to be held in Chicago rather than Buffalo.
- F. H. Luthe, writing in Hardware, argues that the "trade abuses" dealers deplore are the logical result of economic evolution, and that hardware men must meet price competition and popularize retail prices rather than fence off their trade province; he closes with Grant's reply to McPherson on the first night of Shiloh.
- The India Rubber World notes that the loss of the Cyril and her 210 tons of Amazon rubber briefly advanced London prices, and that all but seventeen tons were salved undamaged, rubber being little harmed by weeks under water.
- The Diamond Rubber Company has taken what is said to be the first carload order for bicycle tires ever sent to the Pacific Coast, placed by the Pacific Coast Rubber Company of Tacoma and Portland, and will send the car bedecked with banners.
- The Standard Amusement & Mfg. Co. has incorporated at Bridgeton, N. J., with $50,000 capital and intends among other things to sell and repair cycles; Albert R. McAllister and Clarence and Elmer H. Crane are the incorporators.
- The 1906 Merkel motor employs ball bearings freely for the first time, on all the main bearings and the end of the connecting rod, and also adopts mechanical valves.
- Editorial on the Government agent's Shanghai report, urging American manufacturers to cultivate the Chinese demand and noting how bicycle sales followed the flag into Japan, Cuba and the Philippines after recent wars.
- Editorial on the English clergyman's motor experiments printed elsewhere in the number, explaining why an auxiliary port in the cylinder wall releases exhaust pressure faster than an extra valve in the head, and likening a motor's exhaust to the sanitation of a building.
- Lyman H. Bagg, who still rides a high bicycle, reports 777 7-10 miles ridden bareheaded from the Liverpool dock to the most northerly clothesline in Great Britain, averaging 32 1/2 miles over 24 riding days, and has now sailed for Buenos Ayres.
- A history of Gottlieb Daimler and Maybach at Cannstatt: their vertical-cylinder motor was first fitted to a bicycle with outrigger castor wheels, then to a boat disguised as electrically driven, then to a phaeton and a quadricycle now in the Munich Museum - so the motorcycle preceded the automobile.
- For the first time the year has opened with no venue settled for the world's championship races; Switzerland's track is in doubt and Germany is also a candidate, the International Cyclists' Union to decide in Paris next month.
- At the Sixty-fifth Regiment Athletic Association games at the Broadway armory, Buffalo, W. E. Bauman of the Ariel A. C. won both the eight-man pursuit and the two-mile handicap, but the crowd hissed the judges for giving Gurney Schue the semi-final over R. J. Hoover.
- Portrait and sketch of Ernest G. Grupe, re-elected secretary-treasurer of the New York division of the Century Road Club of America, who rode the first century of the new year and is trying for the mileage medal.
- Governor Stokes's annual message to the legislature recommends that vehicles of all kinds using the public highways be required to carry lights at night.
- Having already had motorcycles exempted from the Automobile Club of America's amended New York bill, President Betts of the F. A. M. has persuaded Editor Beecroft to strike them from Outing's model act, which proposes numbers front and rear, a $25 license fee and a $2 tax on makers and dealers.
- Roland Douglass, chairman of the F. A. M. Competition Committee, is overhauling the motorcycle contest rules, the most important change being a cut in the registration fee from $2 to 50 cents.
- Cable advices from Australia report that Iver Lawson and Floyd McFarland, with Henri Mayer and Walter Rutt of Germany, failed to qualify in the Austral Wheel Race, won by a limit man named Sandberg for a first prize of more than $3,000.
- J. B. Dunlop and R. W. Edlin of Belfast argue in the British papers over who made the first successful pneumatic tires - Dunlop citing a labelled 1888 wheel and Island Spinning Co. cloth, Edlin insisting his partner Finlay Sinclair made the tires on the photographed machine and disputing Dunlop's wired-on patent claim.
- The Maplewood Sporting Club of Newark, N. J., elects Theodore W. Van Iderstine president, Emory H. Dare vice-president, William J. Rink secretary and Charles P. Edwards treasurer, with Frederic H. Allendorf chairman of the board of governors.
- When a St. Paul's school student's bicycle was ridden off from in front of Thomas Allen's store at Garden City, L. I., Allen gave chase on his motorbicycle toward the Jericho turnpike and recovered not only the stolen wheel but a second machine abandoned by an accomplice.
- Charles Knoll on a 3 1/2 horsepower Mitchell won the thirteen-starter hill climb up the four-mile Box Springs Canyon road near Riverside, Cal., in 6 minutes 55 seconds; C. W. Risden (Indian) finished second on a flat rim and afterward cut the hill record to 6:45.
- The elliptical sprocket was shown as a novelty on a motor car at the recent Paris Automobile Show, though it was on a bicycle so fitted that the mile record first went under two minutes, and the Pope Manufacturing Company's adoption of it was later discredited.
- An Irishman who opened a bicycle repair shop pawned the first machine sent in for $3.42, and is now regularly employed on government work for at least four months.
- Rural carrier C. L. Clayton of Wellington, Kansas, doubts the Fourth Assistant Postmaster General ever issued a general ban, and reports covering his 27-mile route in two and a half hours instead of six and a half with a horse, at about 10 cents a trip with gasolene at 20 cents a gallon.
- The English clergyman's further experiments on a 2 1/2 horsepower Minerva: an auxiliary exhaust valve and holes drilled in the cylinder raised it from 2,500 to 3,600 r.p.m., while acetylene gas made a good standby fuel and boiling paraffin burst the feed pipe and set the machine ablaze.
- On a country road near New Bedford, Mass., Fred Pease won the two-mile event over Bennett Marsh's protest that a puncture cost him the race, and William Hanson of Fall River on a Merkel beat Hovland Smith in the five-mile in 11 minutes 45 seconds.
- Shakespeare quotations for January 13 to 22 drawn from Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, Two Gentlemen of Verona, King Henry VIII, King John, King Henry V, Timon of Athens, Anthony and Cleopatra and Othello.
- C. W. Risden's sixty-mile New Year's Day run from Los Angeles to Calabassas and back via Santa Monica ended in dispute: only five of nine starters - Gould, Risden, Trumbower, Parmalee and Faufer - made the second control on time, no proper timing was provided, and F. A. M. rules recognize nothing under 250 miles as an endurance contest.
- Carleton W. Nason, head of a large manufacturing company and a member of the New York Yacht Club, is elected president of the New York Motorcycle Club, with R. H. Nickerson vice-president and governors including Roland Douglass and R. G. Betts.
- License collector's returns show 3,193 St. Louis cyclists paid for the use of the city's streets last year against 3,355 in 1904, a decrease of 162, though many wheelmen never pay the tax.