The Bicycling World, Vol 53, No 14
Articles in this issue
- The Cycle Manufacturers' Association and the Cycle Parts and Accessories Association will hold joint meetings at Atlantic City on July 25 and 26; J. F. Cox and W. J. Surre have taken an option on practically an entire seaside hotel and the passenger associations have granted fare-and-a-third certificate rates.
- The makers of the Werner motor bicycle are putting out a four-horsepower twin whose cylinders sit side by side on a common crank case instead of in tandem, both connecting rods working on a single long crank pin between heavy flywheels.
- The Hendee Mfg. Co. took the contract to supply the Philadelphia Police Department with 24 motor bicycles, each equipped with a cyclometer and a speedometer.
- The Metropolitan Motorcycle Co. has opened at 2628 Broadway, New York, with George Andes, for several years with F. B. Widmayer, as the active man; bicycles will also be handled and repaired.
- The Reading Standard Cycle Mfg. Co. has spent two months road-testing an R-S drop-front motor tandem that seats the woman in front rather than the rear; Sales Manager Sherman says it has “gone far beyond our expectations in efficiency and strength.”
- May export statistics show gains to the United Kingdom (from $30,884 in 1905 to $36,927), to British Australasia and to Other Europe, and increases of 50 to 300 per cent to Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Mexico; the eleven months ending May total $1,276,207.
- Continental police formalities deter women tourists: a young English lady cycling from France into a German town had to declare her parents' consent, pass a practical riding examination, pay $1.80 for a certificate and carry two numbered badges.
- A workshop hint for clearing a damaged thread when no tap is at hand — file three to five V-shaped slots in the screw itself so that it acts as a tap; the same treatment suits crank hangers.
- A trade sketch in which a well-dressed young man runs an uptown dealer's costliest chainless from $200 up through extras — patented crank, wood rims, plated lamp and cyclometer — only to admit he was settling a dinner bet that no bicycle could cost $125.
- A squib: the tramp explains he spent yesterday's dime on a bicycle and now needs a nickel to pay the gentleman he ran over.
- A technical account of how the jet carburetter displaced the old surface type on motor bicycles, and why clean fuel, funnels and tins now matter so much, since a trace of dirt or water clogging the jet cuts out the mixture instantly.
- Why grades seem easier to climb at night: the rider cannot see the summit, so his attention goes to the pedals instead of to the distance still ahead.
- A leader on the difficulty of buying suitable cycling clothes, sporting-goods dealers offering only baggy equestrian garb, heavy hunting gear or mail-order shoddy, and so missing a steady trade among new riders.
- A leader welcoming the drop-front motor tandem, long urged by the Bicycling World, as the machine to bring women into motorcycling now that the motor removes the unequal pedalling that made the pedal tandem a “man killer.”
- On John D. Rockefeller's declaration that bicycle riding is among the best methods of exercise in the world — worth the more, the paper argues, because it carries no taint of commercial interest.
- More women cyclists were seen in the upper part of New York last Sunday than at any one time in five years, and dealers and makers far and wide report rising calls for women's bicycles and saddles.
- A survey of the Fourth of July racing calendar: an inter-club relay at Vailsburg, the Century Road Club Association's twenty-five mile “Long Island Derby” at Valley Stream, and meets at Revere Beach, Atlanta, Dunkirk, Albany, New Brunswick, Hicksville, Richmond, Milwaukee, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, besides the F. A. M. meet at Rochester.
- John Langer, riding off five minutes, won the Edgecombe Wheelmen's fifteen-mile handicap road race on Hoffman boulevard, Jamaica, L. I., in 44:52; scratch man Otto Brandes took first time prize in 40:28 and finished third.
- James F. Moran of Chelsea, Mass., back from an unsuccessful European campaign, lost his first race since returning — Walthour beat him in two straight five-mile heats at Atlanta, Ga.
- The paper's dated calendar of coming meets and road races from June 30 to November 29, 1906, including the F. A. M. annual tour and endurance contest from New York to Rochester, the world's championships at Geneva, and the Century Road Club and Roy Wheelmen fixtures at Valley Stream.
- A four-line verse about the scorcher who rode head down over the handlebars until a brewery wagon hove in sight.
- Thirty-six men are due to leave New York at four o'clock on the morning of July 2 for the fifth annual F. A. M. endurance contest, 390 miles to Rochester by way of Little Falls, ahead of the annual meet of July 4, 5 and 6; with the full entry list of riders and machines and the Crittenden Park race programme.
- A group photograph and roll-call of the twenty-seven riders Manager John M. Chapman has gathered at the Utah saucer, among them “Pedlar” Palmer, Joe Fogler, Walter Bardgett, Iver Lawson, Hardy K. Downing, Saxon Williams and, since the picture was taken, Floyd McFarland.
- Nat Butler won the hour-paced Grand Prix at Dresden on June 13 for a cash prize of $1,650, beating Paul Guignard, Fred Lorgeu and Louis Mettling and covering 49 1/2 miles despite a burst front tyre, then took the Grand Prix de Steglitz at 100 kilometres on the 16th.
- A joke: the rider was fined not for scorching but for crawling along so slowly that he impeded traffic.
- Six professionals — Fenn, Rupprecht, Krebs, Ashurst, Menus Bedell and Schlee — struck at Vailsburg on the 24th over cut purses; Adam Eifler was laid open with a half brick after a free-for-all following the amateur five-mile handicap, and Newark amateurs Halligan, Cobb and Phillips turned professional.
- The National Cycling Association's Board of Control has found W. S. Fenn guilty of breaking his Salt Lake City contract; he must ride in Utah, take a year's suspension or stop riding, and he says he will stop.
- W. Thomas Hall of Canningtown, England, the former world's hour record holder, sails for Europe on July 8, as does his host Bobby Walthour, who may contest the title at Geneva.
- F. A. M. Competition Committee chairman Douglas dismissed the professionalism charges F. W. Horenburger and Albert Kreuder filed against Oscar Hedstrom, Stanley T. Kellogg and George N. Holden after the New York Motorcycle Club's hill climb of May 30, answering all six specifications at length.
- The Waltham Motorcycle Club of Waltham, Mass., elected Clement Hernandez president, Phelps Poland vice-president, F. L. Woorster secretary and Henry W. Robinson treasurer.
- A photograph of the Providence (R. I.) Motorcycle Club drawn up with their machines outside a bicycle and motorcycle store.
- Porcheray, who hired machines under false names and sold them in the next town, toured France four times and stole several hundred bicycles before a victim recognised him on the Boulevard Saint Martin in Paris.
- A veteran rider recommends a tablespoonful of Worcestershire sauce — or a raw onion — against the tired, half-dead feeling that overtakes a cyclist on a long early-season ride.
- Charles E. McCarthy, a Pasadena contractor, fell from his motor bicycle onto the teeth of a hay rake near Los Angeles; Dr. E. H. Thompson removed his heart through the torn breast, washed and sewed the lacerations, replaced it and closed the wound, and the patient is improving.
- Charles A. Sherwood, the New York Athletic Club sprinter “invited” to ride as a professional, has been restored to amateur standing, though the promoters will keep him off the Vailsburg board track until the circuit championship races.
- The Tacoma Railway and Power Co. barred bicycles from its street-car fenders without warning, leaving dozens of Tacoma cyclists caught downtown to ride home in a rainstorm.
- A squib contrasting the Bostonian's affection for his city with the New Yorker's verdict that it is a tough place where even the streets are crooked.
- Iver Lawson rode the three-mile handicap at Salt Lake City from scratch in 5:49, erasing both his own 5:55 4/5 saucer record and W. E. Samuelson's 6:11 handicap mark, and so saving manager John Chapman the Heidelberg Café wager he had staked on no record falling before the Fourth.
- A workshop hint: drill the motor's cooling ribs vertically with a twist drill, and if more radiation is wanted, wind copper wire round a pencil and fit the spirals between adjacent ribs.
- Arthur E. Rhodes, off four minutes, won the Roy Wheelmen's fifteen-mile handicap road race at Valley Stream in 40:52 1/2 and took first time prize as well, riding a Columbia chainless with thirty-inch wheels; club secretary Ralph Roullier was second.
- John Hume, the University of Utah's crack sprinter, has written to N. C. A. Board of Control chairman R. F. Kelsey asking for a franchise, saying he will build a saucer in Denver to replace the demolished track.
- A courtroom joke: the witness is certain the motorcycle struck the man because when he first saw him he was fifteen feet up in the air and still going.
- The full Paris mail account of Frank Kramer's Grand Prix victory of June 17 — he took the pole at the pistol and held it to beat Poulain and Friol by a quarter of a wheel for more than $2,000, only the second American to win after Banker in 1894.
- A joke on the English doctor's prediction that the bicycle and rapid transport are breeding a legless race — convenient in a presidential election year, when everybody would be going on the stump.
- F. J. Walker won the five-mile handicap from the 220-yard mark and the half-mile motorpaced race against T. McCarthy of Stratford, Ont., before about 1,000 people at the West End track, Detroit, on June 24.
- A rider's account of his first outing on a motor bicycle — two miles of uphill macadam, then a long descent of indifferent cow paths, and the sand patch at the foot of the hill that threw him.
- Rain failed to spoil the meet at Washington Park-on-the-Delaware on June 23, where more than 4,000 saw J. Farber take the one-mile handicap in 2:42 3/5 and Dan Trotter the three-mile from scratch; the racing owes its revival to the Stroud and Atlantic Wheelmen and to “Dick” Stroud and “Charlie” Van Doren.
- The Vailsburg management will add motorpaced races to draw crowds, though the paper warns that with the track in its present state there will be a killing unless the oval is resurfaced.
- Abroad, John D. Rockefeller gave an American correspondent an impromptu bicycle lesson on the Avenue des Beauxmonte, holding the machine himself and telling Dr. Biggar that the pushing out of the legs drives the blood away from the head.
- At Salt Lake City on June 19 Iver Lawson won the five-mile lap race with Walter Bardgett's help despite the N. C. A.'s ban on teaming; Jack Hume took the two-mile lap race, Samuelson the mile invitation, and “Duck Soup” Turville the five-mile motorcycle open in 6:38.
- Weekly patent abstracts: Robert A. Middleton's carburetter for gasolene engines (822,681), Benjamin A. Gramm's two-compartment muffler (823,115), and two cycle-saddle patents (823,915 and 823,916) by John B. Brooks of Birmingham and John Holt of Aston, England.