The Bicycling World, Vol 53, No 17
Articles in this issue
- Deferred shareholders of the much-reorganized British Dunlop Tire Company met in Dublin to protest a reconstruction scheme cutting capital from $20,000,000 to $11,000,000 while limiting their interest to $2,500,000, and to question the directors' $525,000 profit estimate and holdings in the Collier Tire, Midland Rubber and German Dunlop companies.
- The Veeder Mfg. Co. has let contracts for a three-story, 40x54-foot fireproof concrete addition to its Hartford, Conn., plant, ready about October 1st, with the Post & Lester Co. taking the basement and first floor.
- Combination Hubs, Ltd., the British coaster brake patent pool, now has the field to itself after Seabrook Bros. withdrew their infringement appeal and settled out of court.
- Preview of the Cycle Manufacturers' Association and Cycle Parts and Accessory Association meetings at the Hotel Islesworth, Atlantic City, July 25th-27th, listing papers to be read by W. H. Crosby, W. F. Remppis, R. G. Betts, C. F. U. Kelly, C. L. Kelsey, Harry Walburg, Frank C. Storck and R. D. Webster.
- Anson G. Ronan, of Toronto, Ont., has been granted Letters Patent 825,867 for a combined intake and exhaust valve that makes one mechanically operated valve serve both offices in a motorcycle engine.
- Picric acid's tendency to form sensitive picrates and picramates on contact with metals and salts, and its poisonous vapors, make it unfit for use in the internal combustion motor cylinder.
- Carl Roberstein, of Columbus, Ohio, night foreman at Robert F. Boda & Co.'s garage, has designed on paper a 600-pound, 100-inch wheelbase motor bicycle with 36-inch wheels and a twenty-horsepower four-cylinder motor which he claims will do three miles a minute at Ormond Beach.
- A rust-preventing mixture made by dissolving an ounce of camphor in an ounce of melted lard and adding black lead until it takes an iron color.
- Editorial urging every man in the trade to attend next week's Atlantic City convention, which it calls the first occasion on which cycle tradesmen will exchange views openly rather than merely shake hands.
- Editorial backing "Longmarker's" call for an organization to govern road racing, arguing that the collapse of the Vailsburg track makes control urgent and that falsified entry blanks and racing under false names are simple theft; notes a parallel demand that Britain's National Cyclists' Union resume control.
- Editorial on the "do it now" principle in machine care, warning against soft tires, feast-or-famine oiling and neglected chains that cost the rider a walk home or worse.
- Describes a growing swindle in which a traveler steals a bicycle, rides it to the next town and sells it to a second-hand dealer before the theft is reported, repeating the process across the country and blackening the reputation of second-hand dealers.
- At Revere Beach on Saturday night, 14th inst., Elmer J. Collins of Lynn, Mass., beat Hugh MacLean of Chelsea and Menus Bedell of Newark in a 25-mile motor-paced race in 37:18 4/5, while J. B. Coffey took the twenty-five mile motorpaced handicap from James F. Moran and Pat Logan.
- L. J. Mueller, the Cleveland motorcyclist, has left for the Pacific Coast to attempt a new cross-continent record, dropping off at Cheyenne, Wyo., for a 1,000-mile preliminary run to San Francisco on his Indian motor bicycle to learn the roads and the Rocky Mountain crossing.
- At Salt Lake City on July 10 Iver Lawson was beaten easily by W. E. Samuelson in the much-heralded unlimited match pursuit race, failing to take a single first, while Floyd McFarland challenged the winner with a $200 side bet.
- At Ogden, Utah, on July 11, the Australian Ernest A. Pye won the five-mile lap professional event in 9:48 4/5, a world's record, beating Joe Fogler, W. P. Palmer, C. L. Hollister and J. E. Achorn.
- How San Francisco's cycle trade is housed since the fire, illustrated by C. C. Hopkins's Indian agency at 729 Gough street near Golden Gate avenue, a 50x100-foot shack cleared and built in fifteen days by architect E. L. Malsbary of the San Francisco Motorcycle Club.
- L. H. Boyer, of Lawndale, Pa., is under arrest for exceeding the speed limit and making excessive noise after his open muffler frightened a horse and caused a collision between two wagons in which two persons were injured.
- Newport, R. I., has set August 6th for its annual beach races, which will include several motorcycle events placed in charge of B. A. Swenson of Providence, the F. A. M. representative for the State.
- Quoting the Motor Trader on how the small diameter of the gudgeon pin and the excessive angular movement of the connecting rod wear the pin oval or punish the piston and rod bushing, and on a disc-flange pin fitted with a scribed ring line that remedied it.
- Fred Hoyt, of Boston, suspended on charges of professionalism after sweeping the boards at the Chicago Motorcycle Club's July 4th meet, has been reinstated by the F. A. M. Competition Committee, which found he had received no money and did not own the machine he rode.
- On the "hardy annual" crop of formulae claiming to solder aluminum, and an English founder's rival claim, with the advice to start from the assumption that it cannot be done and then test each published method in turn.
- A gasolene motor recently exhibited abroad works on the Otto cycle with no side shaft or cams, its exhaust valve opened by a relay fed through a port uncovered by the piston, and governed by a flywheel weight that opens the ignition switch as speed rises.
- The reorganized Los Angeles Motorcycle Club held its first event on Sunday, 8th inst., a 140-mile run from Los Angeles to San Bernardino and return, of which 110 miles counted, and only 27 of the 46 starters finished with perfect performances.
- The Park Circle Cycle Club of Brooklyn held four short road races on Staten Island on Sunday, 15th inst., Charles H. Stein of the hosts taking the one-mile handicap from fifteen yards, ahead of Louis J. Weintz and V. J. Lind.
- Greater New York's veteran riders will hold the Veterans' Eighth Annual Century Run over a two-day Long Island outing on August 11 and 12, the main division going to Sag Harbor by boat and running back to Jamaica; particulars from C. P. Staubach, 220 Broadway, or D. M. Adee, 18 Cortlandt street.
- A motorcyclist whose tank seam became unsoldered on a lonely road plugged the break with his handkerchief and, when that failed, pressed the water container of his acetylene lamp into service as a fuel tank to avoid a long walk.
- "Roaming Rhoda," the girl tramp long known to cyclists of eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware for riding freight trains, has taken to stealing bicycles and escaping arrest on them.
- Portraits of Dr. C. W. LaSalle, chairman of the general committee, and W. B. Williams, chairman of the racing committee, the two Rochester Motorcycle Club members who bore the brunt of the F. A. M. meet.
- Thirty-eight of seventy-three starters completed the six-day Land's End to John O'Groat's endurance trial of approximately 889 miles on Saturday, June 16th, fourteen of them with perfect scores and gold medals.
- Edwin Beers, a Newark lawyer and sportsman, has obtained control of the Vailsburg track after the retirement of C. B. Bloemecke and will continue Sunday racing, with Kramer to ride and Al Guery selected as track manager.
- Walter W. Wilson, long identified with cycle racing and this year successor to Abbott Bassett as chairman of the National Cycling Association Board of Appeals, was killed instantly and Louis Block seriously injured near Buffalo when Block's car struck a telegraph pole while testing at speed.
- "Dan" Ruller has filed suit to vacate the judgment of an Indianapolis justice of the peace who fined him $10.40 for riding a bicycle on a cement sidewalk, arguing the city ordinances do not specifically forbid it.
- An old cyclist's first-person account to a Bicycling World man of his first ride on a borrowed Orient pacing machine, from the split-pin switch that kept dropping out to the sand pits, barking exhaust and bolting horses on two miles of uphill macadam.
- Johannesburg, South Africa, disputes Nuremberg's claim to the highest bicycle-to-population ratio, counting 27,473 bicycles and 276 motorcycles among a population of about 160,000, though a license fee of about 60 cents a year and strict enforcement may check the growth.
- The Tour de France, started a fortnight since, requires 2,780 miles in thirteen days of racing time, an average of 210 miles a day with one stage of 290, a test of endurance beside which a 25 to 50 horsepower automobile's 1,200 miles in a fortnight dwindles into insignificance.
- An amateur experimenter's trials of acetylene as a motorcycle fuel on a 1906 Quadrant, admitting the gas via the Longuemare carburetter's extra air inlet, with his conclusions on ignition timing, the 3 1/2 horsepower engine's firing rate and the deposits of moisture it leaves.
- Reviews the changing theories of rusting, from simple oxidation to the ferrous carbonate stage under carbonic acid, and Prof. Dunster's explanation that pure oxygen with water attacks iron to give ferrous oxide and hydrogen peroxide.
- Warns that in any but skilled hands a file is more likely to destroy than repair, particularly on a carburetter needle that appears not to seat well, where leaving it alone until proper facilities are at hand is the better part of discretion.
- Looks back at an 1894 article, "A Great Problem for Modern Science and Invention to Solve," which predicted bicycles ridden at a mile a minute by better use of the combined strength of legs, arms and trunk, and notes the prophecies were never fulfilled because the design and method of power application never changed; cites Zimmerman.
- An Englishman's experiments answering "Do we waste petrol?" in the affirmative, using a metal tube, a needle through a dry cork and an induction coil bridging a five-inch gap as an improvised spark plug, and finding that as many as four explosions could be got from one microscopic charge of gasolene.