The Bicycling World, Vol 54, No 23
Articles in this issue
- Two lines of bicycles and three of motorcycles are shown at the Sportsmen's Show in Madison Square Garden: Reading Standard stages its own bicycles and R-S motorcycles, J. F. McLaughlin exhibits the N. S. U. in single and twin models, and the New York Sporting Goods Co. shows Hudson bicycles plus a Corbin two-speed coaster brake it is specially “featuring.”
- The Pierce Cycle Co. of Buffalo will market a Thor-type motorcycle this year while experimenting with original designs of its own, and its factory is running night and day on pedal bicycles to catch up with orders.
- The Eadie Mfg. Co. has been absorbed by its chief competitor, the Birmingham Small Arms Co., for 42,500 common shares plus 23 shillings on each of Eadie's 12,665 £5 preferred shares; Albert Eadie becomes director of the B. S. A. cycle department.
- British cycle exports in January reached £109,011 — 6,740 complete bicycles worth £32,865 and £76,155 of parts — the heaviest month since the boom year of 1897, against £104,195 in January 1906 and £65,589 in 1905.
- The Emblem Mfg. Co. of Angola, N. Y., began delivering its new motorcycles this week; Manager Schack reports demand “quite good” and expects to keep shipments to 10 days' time.
- E. J. Willis, among the first New York dealers to take up motorcycles and one of the first to drop them, has returned to the trade and secured the Merkel agency.
- The Worcester Pressed Steel Co., Worcester, Mass., has installed only the second oxy-acetylene welding furnace in the country; its roughly 6,300-degree flame fuses joints without flux, replaces riveted and soldered work, and can cut metal to a kerf no wider than a common saw's.
- F. J. Semple, vice-president of Simmons Hardware Company, St. Louis, tells a retail hardwaremen's convention that the world runs on a law of compensation, and that catalogue-house competition is met by personal effort — finding out what a customer ordered, undercutting it with better goods, and training clerks in salesmanship.
- David Apstein of Bridgeport, Conn., brings out an oval metal-rubber single-tube repair plug with a swivelled head, its threaded stem carrying a cutting end that enlarges a small puncture and doubles as a thumb handle.
- J. A. Belin of New York, after several years' experiment, has sold his aluminium brazing and repair process to the Allyne Brass Foundry of Cleveland, Ohio, which will market castings made by it for the 1907 trade on a royalty basis.
- Boynton made his annual appearance before the Massachusetts legislature seeking renewal of the expired charter for a monorail line running south from Boston into Rhode Island, claiming $1,000,000 spent, 50,000 test trains at up to 115 miles an hour, and obstruction by railroad interests; his only track, near Gravesend, Long Island, sank into the marshes.
- Consul E. L. Harris reports Smyrna's bicycle sales down to perhaps 250 a year for want of roads — only the Bournabat and Boudja routes are fit to ride — with high-geared English and German free wheels selling at $30 to $40 under an 11 per cent duty, and American tools used for repairs.
- Most of the better known Continental makers are bringing out light weight motor bicycles; the N. S. U. is catalogued at 75 pounds including a magneto but rated at only 1¼ horsepower.
- The paper rebuts the newspaper claim, drawn from the 1905 census, that “bicycles have been driven from the market by automobiles,” arguing that boom-era capitalisation is no criterion of the trade and that the bicycle market has appreciated steadily for two years.
- The Tuberculosis Congress at Atlanta named fresh air, moderate exercise and deep breathing as the three essentials against the “white plague,” and commended consistent use of the bicycle as among the most satisfactory means of obtaining them.
- Herman H. Hintze, a New York City watchmaker riding a Reading Standard, won both Century Road Club of America medals with 20,292 miles and 139 centuries in 1906, ahead of club treasurer Harry Early of Bayonne, N. J. (13,220 miles, 114 centuries); 619 centuries and 75,225 miles were reported in all.
- Louis Mettling, the “Flying Schoolboy,” and Elmer J. Collins fell so often in a five-mile pursuit at the Lynn, Mass., roller skating rink that the manager called it off for a mile match, which Mettling won by half a wheel after Collins struck a flag stick in the eighteenth lap.
- R. G. Betts, head of the Federation of American Motorcyclists, has been appointed to the American Olympic Games Committee of 1908 — chaired by James E. Sullivan of the A. A. U., with President Roosevelt as honorary president — for the games in London.
- The bill to require bicycles and horse-drawn vehicles to carry lamps in Massachusetts was promptly killed in committee, although no opposition developed at its public hearing.
- At its 1907 annual meeting in Hotel Bartholdi, New York, the National Cycling Association created a Junior Amateur Short Distance Championship, assumed control of road racing under Chairman Kelsey, and transferred thirteen amateurs — including Salt Lake's Jack Hume and Fred West — to the professional class for racing for cash pools on Long Island.
- Full-page signed editorial cartoon of a sleeping enthusiast beset in bed by imps bearing lamps, tanks and motorcycle fittings, with a motor bicycle and a pedal bicycle floating in dream-clouds overhead.
- Fresh from his Buffalo-to-Golden Gate run, Bowmar answers questions on transcontinental touring: ride a familiar single-cylinder machine with high clearance and short cranks, carry soap for gasolene leaks and no spare outer tire, ship batteries and oil ahead west of Denver, allow for the 130-mile storeless Red Desert between Rawlins and Rock Springs, and budget about $300 for eighty days.
- The F. A. M.'s campaign against automobile-law burdens has turned up the fact that Philadelphia's motorcycle police carry small tags of their own creation while every other rider must bear the state's two big cast-iron plates; opposition to the bill's 30-mile-an-hour clause may force its alteration.
- A rider describes a 38-mile trip over the Washington Pike — sand, corduroy and unbroken blast-furnace slag — that took far longer than the six hours expected and converted him to good roads; he returned by rail and later rode the excellent route through Ellicott City.
- E. W. Carritt on motorcycle lubrication: the first hundred miles decide whether a new engine scores or seizes, over-lubrication is much the lesser evil than under-lubrication, quality of oil beats quantity, and old oil should be drained hot from the crank-case at stopping places.
- A rider stranded without gasolene in a small country town ran on rhigolene, a petroleum derivative the local druggist had bought years before for a dentist's use as an anaesthetic, and which is so volatile it boils at about the temperature of the body.