The Bicycling World, Vol 52, No 3
Articles in this issue
- The Pope Mfg. Co.'s Chicago factory has launched a straightout coasterbrake model fitted with a Corbin coasterbrake and built for the jobbing trade, meaning it will be marketed under a variety of names.
- The committee of five manufacturers formed at the last annual meeting of the National Cycle Trade Association cannot meet until about 1 November, when chairman W. H. Graham returns from Europe.
- Ralph D. Webster, secretary of the Eclipse Machine Co., returns from a two months' western tour reporting the country bare of old stock: a Denver house sought 200 bicycles in vain, a small Colorado Springs dealer sold seven in one September day, and Los Angeles curbs are stacked with wheels.
- An Eastern traveller reports Chicago jobbers carrying lower stocks and buying heavier than for years, with more than one manufacturer predicting that next year will be as big as any they have seen.
- The Miami Cycle and Mfg. Co. of Middletown, Ohio, has secured exclusive use of the Persons Mfg. Co.'s new Maximus saddle, rated by its makers the equal of a cushion frame, for its leading Racycles.
- Freeman Hinckley, previously assistant manager, takes over management of the Pope Mfg. Co.'s Boston branch left vacant by the resignation of W. J. Foss.
- D. C. Spraker, president of the Kokomo Rubber Co., reports a 50 per cent increase for 1905 and says that despite the company's good automobile tire, bicycle tires remain the more satisfactory business and come first in Kokomo's estimation.
- Charles F. Hickey is appointed receiver of the Sidney B. Bowman Cycle Co., formerly of two New York stores, on the application of Jordan J. Rollins, who won a long-litigated judgment against it on 3 April 1905.
- Geo. R. Broadbent writes from Melbourne defending independent hand brakes and a front-tire brake over the back-pedalling coasterbrake, which lets the foot creep on rough surfaces, and praises the "Mushroom" hub handbrake while promising to try a coaster hub and two-speed gear.
- Quoting the London Field on a second English cycling boom built on cheap machines bought by the lower classes, helped by last year's expiry of the pneumatic tire master patents, with riders thronging suburban roads on Saturdays and Sundays.
- Motorcyclists bound from New Haven to Dieppe emptied their tanks into the river; a young Englishman threw a lighted match on the floating gasolene out of curiosity, set fire to the boat and his clothes, and was badly burned before rescue.
- Argues that competition ratings should rest on piston displacement rather than the maker's "dream horsepower," and sets out Calender's formula, which divides piston area times stroke by the combined weight of machine and rider and multiplies by time.
- A French firm's pneumatic holder, a small exhaust pump with a rubber end the diameter of the valve head and a screwdriver-like projection for the valve notch, lets a motorcyclist grind in a valve without touching it by hand.
- A hardwood rod or wire spoke held between the teeth and pressed against the motor, with the ears stopped by the finger tips, carries the vibrations to the observer and traces an elusive knock to its origin.
- A commission sitting at Pompton has settled the abandonment of the "Cannon Ball" road through Howard P. Frothingham's property at Wanaque, N. J., a route by which Tories shipped cannon to Lord Howe's army and long an objective for bicycle and motorcycle tourists.
- Warns that country road dust carries animal refuse and organic matter into strained, wind-blasted eyes, and urges a pair of pince nez set with plain or plano-cylindrical lenses instead of a motorist's goggles.
- Notes that the spring forks, spring handle bars and other anti-vibration contrivances swept away by the pneumatic tire are being resurrected for the motor bicycle, and argues that its vibration is more apparent than real.
- The gasolene motor is as reliable as any prime mover if the oil feed is nicely regulated and shut off after a run and the cylinders flushed with kerosene; excess oil either bridges the spark plug points with carbon or gums them like mica.
- W. C. Chadeayne, cross-continent motorcyclist, wires from Potter, Neb., with 2,182 miles run; bitten three times by a dog while repairing the idler of his Thomas, he made only 53 miles that day but rode by full moon to North Platte, 157 miles, on his thirtieth day out from New York.
- The cyclist battalion recently formed at Chalons will be employed as a complete unit in the French army manoeuvres in the East; General Langlois urges each field army be given a mobile reserve of five thousand cyclists, three thousand cavalry and thirty guns.
- At Paris on 20 September Cissac, on a Peugeot, created new records from ten to one hundred kilometres, averaging better than 56 miles an hour and covering 62 miles in 1:06:46.
- Erne W. Smith of Denver won the twenty-five mile motor paced race on the Colorado saucer on 1 October in 37:48 from Hardy K. Downing and James F. Moran, who punctured and fell in the sixteenth mile; a week later cold winds spoiled the meet and Hugh MacLean took the same event in 36:37.
- The dog clipper of the Seine banks works a shearing machine belted to a three-horsepower air-cooled motorcycle engine mounted on a home-made cart carried on two tireless bicycle wheels, leaving each poodle its bracelets, tail tuft and moustache.
- Champion Frank L. Kramer beat "Bennie" Munroe of Memphis in two motor paced heats, 1:08 and 2:12, on the Tri-State fair dirt track at Evansville, Ind.; Roy Brown took the amateur half-mile match race from Ole Flagler and Samuel Troger the motorcycle event.
- The Pope has permitted cycle and running races in the Vatican gardens for a gathering of a great Italian amateur sport organization at Rome, and has promised to present the prizes and give works of art as surprises.
- The Stroud, Century and Atlantic Wheelmen of Philadelphia, Camden and Atlantic City will revive the Camden-Atlantic City record run on Sunday 29 October, starting from Camden City Hall over the White Horse pike to the new meadow boulevard.
- At the Tiger Wheelmen's second club championship meet on the dirt track at Valley Stream, Long Island, Henry Vanden Dries won the mile open and Urbain McDonald the two-mile and the "miss and out" novelty race in which a pistol signalled the lap prizes.
- Over a thousand watched the Omaha (Neb.) Motorcycle Club's first meet at Sprague Park track, where Louis Flescher won the mile open and the ten-mile State championship, A. H. Flint the three-mile and a 1:13 mile record, and W. Hamilton both bicycle events.
- James F. Cox, Jr., of New Haven beat Stanley T. Kellogg of Bridgeport, both on 1 3/4 horsepower Indians, by nearly half a lap in the five-mile open motorcycle race at the Danbury, Conn., agricultural fair; time 7:04.
- At Northampton a man calling late at a cycle agent's, representing himself a police officer in pursuit of a thief, obtained the loan of a bicycle; he was traced, the machine recovered and the man committed for trial.
- Otto Lueders and Alwin Boldt took the foliage-screened approach to the Havel drawbridge at Werder near Magdeburg at full speed; Lueders stopped inches from the edge but Boldt rode into the river, swam clear and later recovered his machine.
- A broken bicycle abandoned on the car tracks near Tuxedo Park, St. Louis, sent a trolley car ploughing along the roadway into the surrey of Frank Vincent and party, demolishing it and seriously injuring the horses.
- Amesbury (Mass.) merchants must stop opening their boxes on the sidewalks after cyclists and automobilists complained of nails thrown into the street; Officer Moison has been detailed on the case.
- An old-time cyclist recalls a Memorial Day run from New York to Philadelphia by the Perth Amboy post road, and the mile of boulder-strewn dirt between New Brunswick and Princeton, an L. A. W. pet aversion, where each wheel picked up ten pounds of mud.
- English racing "pros" have been hired as scouts by the Automobile Association's committee to find police speed traps on the roads out of London, locate crouching constables by their footprints and warn approaching drivers.
- C. L. McEnerney has resigned as chairman of the racing board of the California Associated Cyclists after twenty years in Pacific Coast cycling; he also led the California Cycling Club and organized the Yerba Buena Cyclers.
- Cycling's spoof, offered as a team mate to the revived ball bearing yarn, has a tacky rubber patch blown onto the North-Western line between Harrow and Pinner and holding up the Scotch express until kerosene was fetched from an oil shop.
- Hackensack policeman William Bellm left his new bicycle on the veranda in the care of Romeo, his fifty-pound brindle bulldog; ten minutes later the wheel was gone and Romeo was asleep in the same spot.
- "Erledigungshescheimigung" is the Austrian name for the certificate a cyclist must obtain in order to wheel out of the country as a bona fide tourist.
- A motorcyclist riding his mount minus belt and with an empty tank was fined $3.75 with costs for want of an identification plate, more than a man fined for beating an enemy with the buckle end of an army belt.
- Asking what became of the tandems, triplets and quads of the boom, a foreign cyclist reports finding one quad's frame in rural England, rusted and bound with bale wire to two posts as part of a patchwork fence.
- A Frenchman writing to a French paper finds Napoleon's birthplace too hilly for all but the most experienced cyclist but perfection for the motorcyclist, with no custom house annoyances, excellent roads, magnificent scenery and incredibly cheap inns.
- Weekly abstracts of newly issued patents, including Jules Carpenter's induction coil for igniting explosion motors, William A. Hatcher's carburetter for the Brew-Hatcher Co., Alfred Westmacott's carburetter and vaporizer, Thomas H. Lindley's pneumatic tire guard and Earnest C. Fowler's bicycle boat.