The Bicycling World, Vol 54, No 3
Articles in this issue
- The Pope Mfg. Co. and the Rubber Goods Mfg. Co. amicably settle the two three-year-old suits over the $200,000 annual tire rebate promised under the 1899 American Bicycle Co. agreement; terms were arranged by Charles H. Dale, Samuel P. Colt and Anthony N. Brady for Rubber Goods and A. L. Pope, William A. Read and F. S. Smithers for Pope.
- On November 1st the Pope Mfg. Co. will shut its Boston branch at 223 Columbus avenue, the city where Col. Pope first sold imported machines in 1878; a former Pope man in New England is expected to open a store for the line.
- The Cycle Manufacturers' Association puts its next meeting back a week from the November 7th date it had fixed, and will now meet on Wednesday the 14th.
- Patent Commissioner Allen denies Robinson's appeal in the long-running Townsend vs. Copeland vs. Robinson coaster-brake interference, holding his motion to amend the issue outside Rule 109 and affirming the Examiner of Interferences.
- Trade changes: the Wagner Motorcycle Co. removes to 2384 Broadway, New York; Scott McDonald's store at Edmond, Okla., is destroyed by fire; H. A. Knevels opens a bicycle store at 129 South Main street, Elkhart, Ind.; and O. L. Erwin & Co., Aurora, Ill., dissolves.
- A stock company is being agitated at St. Paul, Minn., to build motorcycles and light gasolene motors around devices perfected by Arthur D. Muller, who has secured a factory building and is soliciting subscriptions.
- W. W. Prout, C. W. Merrill and A. Dickinson have formed a company for a general bicycle and automobile business at Miami, Fla., and applied for a charter.
- The Lincoln Cycle Company of Lincoln, Neb., takes out papers of incorporation with $20,000 capital, B. D. Wood and Fred Grotte named as corporators.
- Annual balance sheets to July 31st show the Birmingham Small Arms Co. crediting its cycle and parts department with profits of about $370,000, the Premier Cycle Co. raising output from 63,000 to 73,500 machines, and gains at the Raglan Cycle & Anti-Friction Ball Co. and the James Cycle Co. of Birmingham.
- Now that every roadside repairman keeps a vulcanizing outfit for automobile tires, the addition of a mold or two lets him repair gashed bicycle tires that formerly had to go back to the makers.
- A motorist stranded by a short circuit with no insulating tape bought glass beads at a wayside notion store, strung them along the stripped wire and rode on.
- Louis Saussard of Paris patents a single poppet valve whose flanged sliding body and concentric ported sleeve handle both inlet and exhaust in a four-cycle motor, worked by a two-throw cam; the article doubts how it will stand the heat.
- James Topliff of South Manchester sold for $10 a bicycle he had bought on lien from dealer C. E. House, and though he later paid House in full a stale warrant put him in jail overnight and cost him $15 in fines.
- A foreign make-and-break spark plug sold as the "gearless" breaks its contact mechanically, the piston striking a perforated sleeve at the top of its stroke, rather than depending on the current as magnetic types do.
- Leader arguing that motor-car headlight glare blinds oncoming cyclists and drivers, that the very brilliancy which helps the user injures his adversary, and that legislation and ground-throwing lamps are premature — the deflector blade described the week before being the most promising palliative.
- A repairman tells a Bicycling World man how Sunday shop loafers taunt broken-down motorcyclists with "Carburetter go wrong?" and "Battery go dead?", once provoking a customer to abuse a bystander he had mistaken for the proprietor.
- Transposing the battery leads at intervals reverses the polarity of the primary current and counteracts the arc that builds a cone on one contact point and a matching cup on the other.
- Cures for a wheezing reed horn: tap the air pipe near the neck of the horn while working the bulb, or draw the tube and pick the dirt from under the reed tongue, slipping a pin under the tongue and bending it down if it will not stand out.
- At the Velodrome Bazacle, Toulouse, France's first six-day race, the promoters decamped with the receipts in the fifty-first hour; the unpaid riders restarted on their own account and the Georget brothers won with 1,994.93 miles as sympathetic crowds doubled to 10,000 a day.
- Nine of the twelve Providence Motorcycle Club men who started the Providence-Worcester-Boston triangle finished inside the day, B. A. Swenson first home on a 3 horsepower De Dion he assembled himself; F. Wilkinson fell in the mud near Woonsocket and tire trouble stopped D. Reilly.
- The Chicago Motorcycle Club will hold its first hill-climbing contest on the 20th at Algonquin — the only elevations found near the city being Perry hill and Phillips hill — limited to single-cylinder machines of 49 cubic inches under F.A.M. rules.
- The New York Motorcycle Club sets its annual open fall century for Election Day, November 6th, over the little-frequented New York to Bedford route and back, with silver fobs for souvenirs; Capt. A. J. Bendix is in charge.
- Paced by the Frenchman Pillas at Antwerp, the Belgian amateur Tubbax added 813 yards to Audemars' 1903 world's hour record with 43 miles 1,246 yards, officially timed for the Union Cycliste Internationale.
- Rain cut the Roy Wheelmen's postponed 25-mile Inter-State Cycling Derby at Valley Stream to 74 of an expected 250 starters and over thirty men finished together; John Krayci won but was disqualified for taking pace, handing the championship to Ernest Olufs, while time-prize winner Frank W. Eifler had been pushed along by a ginger-ale-mellowed official on a motor bicycle.
- At Leipzig on September 30th Paul Guignard beat Contenet's two-hour record by 5 miles 1,375 yards, covering 105 miles 195 yards before 15,000 people; Walthour slipped on the banking early and finished with 94 miles 389 yards.
- Lorenzo Dailey on a Metz passed Shellabarger and then Halm in the eighth mile to win the ten-mile motorcycle race — the feature of the Kansas City automobile meet — in 14:52.
- After two months' idleness from a collar-bone broken at Paris, the veteran American pace-follower Nat Butler lost a 10-kilometre race at Madebourgh to Bruno Demke by under fifty yards, Ivan Goor third.
- Powers and Pollok want only three foreign teams for the December Madison Square Garden six-day; Coquelle cables Petit-Breton, Cadolle, Rutt, Vanoni, Vanderstuyft, Stol and the Georget brothers, while at home Root-McFarland, the Bedells and a Walthour-Downey alliance are talked of.
- Inclement weather puts the Vailsburg board track meet back to Sunday, when the quarter-mile amateur championship final will be run and Frank Kramer meets the undefeated Lynn rider Elmer J. Collins over fifteen miles motorpaced.
- Harry Early of Bayonne, N. J., still heads the Century Road Club of America's national century competition for the nine months to September 30th, with Herman H. Hintze second and Andrew Clausen third; Hintze leads on mileage.
- W. G. Ashley of Tumwater, Wash., writes that he rode 54,000 miles on nine makes of bicycle between 1893 and 1903 and 26,000 more on an Indian since, prompted by the Bicycling World's note on Henry E. Ducker.
- The Brower Wheelmen of New York will hold their fourth annual 30-mile handicap on November 29th from Bedford Rest, Brooklyn, to Valley Stream and back, with 45 place prizes and seven for time including four high-grade bicycles; C. Baron is in charge.
- Hugh MacLean beat Parent by over 100 yards in a 50-kilometre motorpaced race at the Velodrome Buffalo, Paris, in 43:40, after Cesar Simar slipped on the banking and quit.
- A long discussion of what makes a machine skid — untracked wheels from weak chain-stays, greasy asphalt and wood, manhole covers and car tracks, ruts, tire width and tread ridges — ending in a summary of rules on pumping tires hard for asphalt and crossing rails at a wide angle.
- A newly patented belt buckled round the rider's waist and hooked to a spring-loaded bar pivoted to the top tube, meant to steady him and put extra power into the pedals; the article notes a crop of such belts went to weed ten years earlier.
- Aurora, Ill.'s first motorcycle meet drew a large crowd to the driving park: Charles Hinckley (Thor) took the ten-mile handicap after Kramer's feed pipe failed, Harry Kramer won the three-mile open and J. Lathin (Marsh) the five-mile handicap.
- The Providence Motorcycle Club's October 21st racemeet carries the F.A.M. ten-mile national championship, with G. H. Curtiss of Hammondsport expected to meet Kellogg and De Rosier of Springfield, and a Newport club four opposing Providence in the unlimited pursuit.
- "Woody" Hedspeth took the sprint, handicap and 20-kilometre paced races — the whole professional program — at the Forstenrieder track, Berlin, then lost to Antonie Dussot at the Velodrome Buffalo, Paris, when his pacing machine gave trouble.
- Oscar Schwab finished second to Danjou in a lap race at the Buffalo Velodrome, Paris, besides taking three lap prizes; the same meeting saw Schreyer give his first Paris performance, riding down an incline and diving from the machine into a tank of water.
- Tracing jerky running past the ignition to the carburetter: check that the tank is not empty and its air vent clear, use the priming pin gently rather than pounding it, blow into the tank opening to shift an air lock, and inspect the inlet valve for carbon deposit.
- To locate a mysterious click, dismount and see whether it stops when the machine does or continues uninterruptedly — it may come from a well drill in the next lot.
- An old-timer's account of a twin-cylinder machine whose rear cylinder oil lead was plugged with cotton waste and dirt until the dry piston seized on its up stroke at speed and blew the cylinder clean off the crankcase, the lubricator leads surviving intact.
- The Bishop of Woolwich rides a tricycle to his Sunday engagements, addressing two congregations in one evening, and holds that a man who must travel on Sunday should do it by his own labour rather than another's.
- The week's grants include Albert Peterson's carburetter, Angelica E. Post's dry-battery cell, Harry M. Hart's device for securing cross-fins in pistons, Bohumil Tulka's bicycle handle-bar, Otto Goldman's exhaust-muffler, a carburetter to John B. Dunlop and his son of Dublin, and James Archer's variable-speed gear.