The Bicycling World, Vol 54, No 11
Articles in this issue
- Frank E. Southard, head of the Toledo Metal Wheel Co., predicts the stripped or jobbing bicycle will touch $15 within 90 days, as a four-to-five-month wait for tubing and a parallel shortage of forgings and castings push quotations far above normal.
- W. K. Thomas leaves the Miami Cycle & Mfg. Co. of Middletown, Ohio, where he had long been the Racycle's sales and advertising manager, to become advertising manager of the Cassady-Fairbanks Mfg. Co. of Chicago.
- The Canadian Billings & Spencer Co. is formed with $200,000 capital to make first-grade drop forgings in Canada; F. C. Billings is president and J. Gill Gardner of Brockville, Ont., takes over as manager on January 1st.
- John R. Keim transfers his Buffalo, N. Y., cycle-component business to a corporation styled the John R. Keim Mills, Inc.; Keim himself retires but the former managers and working organization stay on.
- Representatives of at least three well-known coaster brakes met within the past week over the "throat-cutting" practices of jobbers and dealers, agreeing that corrective measures will now be applied jointly, so a man who offends against one maker offends against all.
- R. R. Harris resigns as eastern sales manager of the Shelby Steel Tube Company to take a similar post with the Seamless Tube Company of America, Pittsburg, Pa., which will add bicycle tubing to the output of its Monessen mill.
- E. S. Benson, until this fall manager of the Hartford Rubber Works Co.'s New York branch, is elected treasurer of the G & J Tire Co., Indianapolis, succeeding C. L. Pepper.
- British cycle exports for October ran to 7,202 completed bicycles worth £37,351 plus £51,257 of parts, and the ten-month aggregate climbed to £951,823 against £768,651 a year earlier, while imports totalled only £134,170.
- American cycle exports for October 1906 rose close to 50 per cent to $95,094 from $65,965, driven by jumps from $2,952 to $17,662 to the United Kingdom and from $12,391 to $22,969 to Japan; a full country-by-country table for 1904-1906 accompanies the report.
- Traces the hammer from a stone lashed to a handle with thongs, through the clawless hammers shown on Egyptian monuments twenty centuries before our era and the claw hammers invented in the Middle Ages, to the fifty-ton hammers of shipbuilding yards.
- Ralph D. Webster and Frank Moseberg, of the Cycle Parts and Accessories Association's special committee on who is entitled to be classed as a jobber, sat in New York on Thursday; the third member, L. M. Wainwright, was kept away by illness.
- W. F. Mann of Yonkers, N. Y., who has handled Indian and Yale motorcycles locally for several years, secures the Indian agency for the whole of Westchester county, the town of Port Chester excepted.
- A London firm of motor bicycle makers is reported to be bringing out two multi-cylinder models, one with a four-cylinder engine and one with a six rated at seven horsepower, both of the V-type.
- Trade changes of the week: Charles Guernon of Little Falls, Minn., moves to larger quarters on First avenue; Houghton & Manning of Traverse City, Mich., sell out to Mrs. Harriet Robey; and Lofton & Einige of Miami, Fla., are succeeded by McIntosh & Richardson.
- After this year the De Dion bicycle motors, long the pattern for low-powered high-speed engines and always fitted with automatic inlet valves, will be equipped with mechanically-operated inlet valves instead.
- The Hendee Mfg. Co. lets it be known that a 3 horsepower single cylinder Indian, catalogued at $250, will be added to its 1907 line as a "special," though no particulars of the machine were made public.
- Report on the 20 motorcycles from 10 makers staged among some 220 motor cars at the Automobile Club of America's Grand Central Palace show, New York, with detailed notice of the 1907 Indian and its roller-gear drive and Corbin coaster brake, the mechanically-valved 3 h.p. R-S and R-S tandem, the Yale-California, Curtiss, Simplex, Wagner, Reliance, M-M and four-cylinder F. N.
- Argues that the eagerness with which motorcyclists greet each year's changes — more flexible carburetters, longer wheel bases, quieter mufflers, roller chains — is a trade asset that bicycle dealers have let decay, and urges them to stir up the same interest again.
- Answers the common complaint of inexperienced motorcyclists that they have followed the maker's printed instructions to the letter and still cannot get going: no maker can anticipate every contingency, so head work must accompany the rule book.
- Preview of the fourteenth annual six-day bicycle race, starting 12:05 a.m. on December 10th in Madison Square Garden under starter Thomas L. Hamilton, with the event's history from "Plugger Bill" Martin's 1,466 miles in 1891, the sixteen teams (Root and Fogler, the Bedell brothers, Walthour and MacLean, Rutt and McFarland, Vanderstuyft and Stol, the Georget brothers, Petit-Breton and Vanoni among them), a $1,500 first prize, and the Georgets' detention at Ellis Island over suspected trachoma.
- George E. Holt's letter of November 10th from Stratford-on-Avon on cycling the English midlands by way of Kenilworth and Warwick, illustrated with his delayed photographs of the Derwentwater Road, Burns's Cottage in Ayrshire and Irish cottages on the northern coast of Erin.
- At the Hicksville (L. I.) Athletic Club's Thanksgiving day races Jerome Steinert beat L. R. Reynolds from scratch in the quarter-mile handicap, Barczik nosed out Steinert by six inches in the mile, and Braun and Steinert won the half-hour team race with 99 laps; the promised "bone-shaker" race fell through for want of old ordinaries.
- Officers of the Port Huron, Mich., force gather up bicycles left in exposed positions — eight on November 28th, six on an average day — and hold them in the city hall corridor until the owner proves title.
- The Prospect Park Cork Pullers' Sunday "bung-starter" on the Brooklyn boulevards drew six-day professionals Root, Fogler, Bardgett and Vanderstuyft; over about twenty miles Fogler trounced the lot, while Root was put out by a twisted chain.
- Edward Delling extracted himself from a pocket to catch J. M. Tanner and win the mile handicap final in the season's fastest time at the Seventy-fourth Regiment armory, Buffalo; J. Schieder took the two-mile from 80 yards and New York's George Cameron was badly beaten.
- Lester R. Creutz, who set out last summer with George E. Holt to criss-cross the Eastern hemisphere by bicycle, gives up and returns to Illinois; Holt will continue the "go-as-you-please" world trip alone and keep telling the story in the Bicycling World.
- Louis J. Weintz beat George Cameron from scratch in the Eighth Regiment's mile handicap at 2:35 and won the two-mile in 5:08; Cameron's third place was disallowed because he had not been a regiment member for 30 days, the place going to C. A. Frommeyer.
- Forty-five miles of macadam are added to Rhode Island's State highway system, giving practically continuous road from Providence to Narragansett Pier and from East Providence to Bristol Ferry, with further work in Hopkinton, Richmond, Exeter, Coventry, Gloucester, Burrillville, Smithfield and on the Hartford road.
- For riders who persist in using pliers instead of a wrench, the parallel-jaw type — such as the "nut pliers" lately brought out abroad — is recommended as less likely to destroy the shape of the nut.
- Alex. Johnson, the penniless Scandinavian tourist who left Bridgeport, Conn., on September 26th for one of the local papers, has reached Binghampton, N. Y., on the return trip, having returned a misdirected $264 check at Chicago and then sold photographs of himself at a Binghampton theatre to fund the rest of his 3,000 miles.
- Robert J. Walthour beat world's champion Louis Darragon at the Velodrome d'Hiver, Paris, on November 18th, walking over the 20-kilometre heat when Darragon stopped and taking the 30-kilometre by four and a half laps; at the same meet Gabriel Poulain beat title-holder Thorwald Ellegaard in a match race.