The Bicycling World, Vol 52, No 5
Articles in this issue
- E. B. Buffum, sales manager of the Consolidated Mfg. Co. of Toledo, and the company's Eastern representative Frank C. Cornish tell the Bicycling World that dealers are carrying almost no old stock and that bicycles sell more readily, and with less haggling over price, than for many years.
- Greece has lifted its import duty on cycles from $2 to 20 drachmen ($3.85) per complete machine as part of a general revenue increase.
- Arthur Mitchel, who failed to make a fortune on the Eastern tracks and went home to New Orleans disgusted with "Yankee tricks," has set up as the Mitchel Cycle Co. at 1,430 Canal street.
- The Pope Mfg. Co. has closed its Providence, R. I., branch; the Shepard Co. has bought some six hundred bicycles and a large accessory stock and takes over the Pope agency there.
- The Harry Fosdick Co., automobile dealers of Boston, have secured the American rights to the Belgian F. N. four-cylinder motor bicycle, a shaft-drive machine rated at only 3 horsepower.
- Weekly trade notes: removals by Roy B—er of Sterling, Ill., and J. W. Harper of West Palm Beach, Fla., a burglary costing John H. Gill of Quincy, Mass., $150, and a $2,000 uninsured fire at Thompson Bros., Springfield, Mo.
- H. Clark Saunders, one of New Brunswick, N. J.'s largest dealers, has incorporated as the Middlesex Motor Co. with $50,000, alongside Louis A. Voorhees and Charles A. White; bicycles and motorcycles will still be carried.
- Phillips & Hamilton of Bradford, Pa., makers of the Holley motor bicycle, have dissolved partnership; Hamilton retires and F. J. Phillips continues the business.
- The first British cycle-trade balance sheets of the year confirm the revival: Birmingham Small Arms reports a net trading profit of $392,813.79 and Eadie Manufacturing of Redditch $235,660, with reports also from Brampton Bros., the James, Enfield, Crabbe Brake, Raglan, Bown and New Hudson companies.
- A machine is said to have been invented for weaving cotton bicycle tires in an endless tube after the manner of lampwicks, the finished tire claimed to resist six thousand pounds to the square inch.
- The trustee of the Acme Cycle Co. of Elkhart, Ind., which failed about three years ago, has filed his final report showing $5,000 for distribution, about 15 per cent to creditors.
- How to reckon a motor's piston displacement — bore squared, times .7854, times the stroke — and divide it by the combined weight of machine and rider to give a factor that lets a handicapper score motorcycle hill climbs and races on fact rather than on the elastic term horsepower.
- Smithing notes: fork the iron and insert the steel, heating the iron first; a flux of 8 pounds borax, 1 pound sal ammoniac and 1 pound yellow prussiate of potash; and the carbon content of wrought iron, machine steel, tool steel and cast iron.
- A recurring skip and apparently dead batteries on an Indian motor bicycle were finally traced to the fibre battery-case head tilting backward over jolts and breaking contact with the grip-control disk; a wooden wedge and extra screws cured it.
- Leader arguing that motorcycle racing needs a real basis of classification, and commending Professor Callender's formula of time, weight and cylinder size — a system that might ultimately require riders or machines to carry weight as in horse racing.
- Urges every New York cyclist to vote on November 7 for the $50,000,000 road amendment, which would provide $5,000,000 a year for ten years and make it possible to ride from New York to Buffalo on hard macadam.
- Letter signed "St. Louis Rider" answering George R. Broadbent of Melbourne, praising the Standard Co.'s two-speed coaster brake hub (56 low, 81 high) after nearly 2,500 miles in the foothills of the Ozarks.
- Secretary Batchelder of the Vanderbilt Cup Commission writes to President Carritt of the Brooklyn Motorcycle Club thanking its members, who patrolled the course, judged the turns and manned the telephone "block system" at the railway crossings.
- A Paris sporting daily printed its correspondent's telegram from the Grand Prize of Thuringia at Erfurt — "Wegen regenwetters ganz ausgefallen" — as a list of four finishers, when it meant that rain had cancelled the racing.
- Francis E. Dodsworth, for several years sub-editor of the St. James's Gazette of London, and civil engineer R. A. Taunton will cycle from Montreal to Vancouver and write the trip up for British journals.
- The Thirteenth Ward Improvement Club of Chicago has voted to ask the board to remove the bicycle and trotting tracks from Garfield Park, arguing they benefit a small class at the park's general expense.
- The New York and New Jersey Telephone Co. of Brooklyn is issuing a free folding pocket map of Long Island with all roads clearly marked, distribution handled by contract agent A. R. Pardington.
- Cross-continent motorcyclist W. C. Chadeayne passed Ogden, Utah, and reached Winnemucca, Nevada, expecting San Francisco within four days — 51 days out from New York, 2½ days behind Wyman's record.
- San Francisco dealer C. C. Hopkins reports selling motorcycles to Dr. H. D'Arcy Power, Dr. W. T. Rathbun of Colusa, Dr. M. B. Bolton, Dr. Kimball and the Rev. Bradford Leavitt, and describes Mrs. Carroll and Mrs. Hopkins driving his double and triple carriers on fifty-mile runs.
- The New York Athletic Club will again run the annual fifteen-mile road race for the Citizens' Cup on Election Day, November 7, over the usual Travers Island course, in resident and athletic/junior classes.
- An oldtime cyclist tells the Bicycling World man how flying grit and night-flying bugs — and one windy club run past the old Guttenberg racetrack on the Hudson County Boulevard — put his eyes out of commission for a week, and argues for motorcyclists' goggles.
- John S. Baumgartner won both the three- and five-mile open motorcycle events at Cyclers' Park, San Jose, over Tormey, Lang, Kelley and Knickerbocker; Lang was thrown avoiding a photographer, and Hal McCormack, paced by Baumgartner, cut the California mile record.
- Long Island will have two events on Thanksgiving Day: the Century Road Club of America's revived Coney Island path handicap, and the Brower Wheelmen's thirty-mile Derby from Bedford Rest to Valley Stream, with Charles Crawford handling entries.
- Robert Walthour defeated the French cracks Simar and Contenet in an hour race at Paris on the 15th inst.
- A. H. Seeley, off a 7-minute handicap, won the Tiger Wheelmen's fifteen-mile road race over the Springfield-Baldwin course in 50:10; Urbain McDonald beat clubmate Peter J. Baum for time honors in 44:54 and now leads the club point table.
- The annual six-day race will be held at Madison Square Garden, New York, the week of December 4 to 10, with the usual Saturday night programme of short races as curtain raiser.
- Dr. C. J. Cannon of Windsor, Ohio, reports that his motor bicycle gets him to a patient three to five miles off in ten to fifteen minutes through sand four inches deep and 15 per cent grades, at about a quarter the cost of a horse and buggy.
- English riders' remedies for the winter side slip range from hobnailed shoes to ease mounting on mud and ice to a tarpaulin cover enveloping machine and rider entire, leaving only a headlight and a pair of eyes visible.
- A roomful of stolen, lost and abandoned bicycles gathered over three years by Toledo patrolmen is a dilemma for the police pension fund trustees, who cannot say whether auction money would go to the city or the relief fund.
- Explains the New York constitutional amendment: $5,000,000 of bonds a year for ten years, 600 to 700 miles of road annually, two through routes from New York City to Buffalo, and a cost to a locality of about $60 a year in added tax per mile.
- The Touring Club de France, on dues of $1, mends roads through three thousand delegates, subscribed a fifth of the $100,000 needed to extend the Cornice road from Cannes to St. Raphael, runs a secret bureau reporting on hotel keepers and repairers, and erects enamel signboards and panoramic view dials.
- Continental riders still marvel at what Nat Butler ate during the recent twenty-four-hour race, in which he finished third — two fowls, 67 pounds of bread, 13½ pounds of beef, 22 quarts of coffee, 11 quarts of wine and much else.
- The Roy Wheelmen's first annual entertainment and ball is set for November 24 at Tammany Hall, Fourteenth street, with an inter-club home trainer race, comedians, boxing, wrestling and fencing before dancing from 11:30 p.m.
- A joke from Tit-Bits: Mrs. Wilkins and her husband argued for months over whether to buy two bicycles or a tandem, and compromised on a rubber-tired perambulator.
- A thief defeated by a locked gearing outside the Manchester and Salford Bank in Mosley street wrote to the Manchester Detective Department, signing himself "Billy," to say where he had abandoned the machine.
- Milwaukee motorcyclist Elmer Peterson and G. J. Hanson's automobile disputed the right of way on Broadway on October 11; the motorcycle was wrecked, the car damaged, and Peterson rode an ambulance to the Emergency Hospital for scalp stitches.
- Arthur Vanderstuyft, the young Belgian long distance sprinter, beat Lepoutre by four laps in an hour paced race at Roubaix, and claims to have signed for this year's six-day race with Johann Stol.
- Dave Mainland of the New Century Wheelmen won the annual three-cornered eight-mile relay race at Alameda, Cal., beating Nelson of the Oakland Wheelmen and Percy Lawrence of the California Cycling Club in the final heat.
- The once famous sixty-mile record run from Camden to Atlantic City is revived on Sunday, limit men starting from Camden City Hall at 7:30 a.m., with a Yale-California racing wheel shod with Diamond tires heading the prize list.
- Crossed electric light wires are believed to have caused the $25,000 fire that ruined the Saddle and Cycle Club's buildings at Sheridan Road and Foster street, Chicago; organized in 1895, the club will rebuild on its insurance.
- Thaddeus Robl and Arend will ride home trainers on German variety stages this winter, but England's "Tommy" Hall and Robert Walthour declined similar contracts, saying they had not come down to vaudeville yet.
- Australia has cut the motorcycle registration fee from $1.25 to 25 cents and the dealers' tax from $15 to $2.50, and raised speed limits from 20 to 25 miles in the country and from 10 to 12 in the cities.
- Some motorists have adopted the small boy's own weapon, the paper torpedo, as a dog and boy preventive — harmless, though somewhat startling, and effective in every instance.
- Abstracts of recent grants: inflation valves to John E. Keller jr. of Litchfield, Conn., and Littleton K. Buck of Freehold, N. J.; an interlaced-strip pneumatic tire cover to Henry W. C. B. Cave of London; a sparking device to Benjamin G. Gilbough of Chicago; and a ball bearing to Rudolph H. Apelt of Roxbury, Mass.