The Cycle Age and Trade Review, Vol 21, No 25
Articles in this issue
- A Denver dispatch reported that departing Seventh Infantry volunteers at Fort Logan sold nearly 200 bicycles cheaply before shipping out for the Spanish-American War, briefly depressing dealers, while the Denver Cycle Repairers' Association — having organized nearly every shop early in the season — was already letting free tire repairs creep back into practice as its early vigilance relaxed.
- New Jersey passed legislation making wide tires compulsory on heavy wagons, a road-protection measure trade observers expected would also benefit cyclists.
- Rumors of Chicago manufacturers laying off workers turned out to reflect not distress but a shift toward assembly: firms that had placed large early orders for standardized parts were cutting only their tool and lathe rooms while nickel-platers, enamelers and shippers stayed busy, becoming what the trade called 'gigantic assemblers' for the fall season.
- Philadelphia's new universal lighting ordinance, requiring lamps on wagons and carriages after dark, took effect to wheelmen's satisfaction, with several drivers already fined for non-compliance despite pleas of ignorance of the law.
- A Louisville correspondent, writing after an unseasonable rain and snowstorm dampened trade, divided the city's cycle retailers into high-grade, medium-grade and low-grade stores and described a dealer-devised two-tag guarantee system for handling warranty disputes.
- Official U.S. export records for the year ending March 1898 showed Germany's cycle-goods imports more than doubling to $1,193,202 while Great Britain's fell, and Argentina, Brazil and the East Indies posted sharp gains.
- Chicago trade circles speculated on the authors of a libelous, unsigned circular attacking Rambler bicycles under the guise of an Associated Cycling Clubs committee report; Gormully & Jeffery Mfg. Co. traced the fictitious signers John Carlson, Okie M. Chesman and Henry Arkson and offered a $1,000 reward for their conviction.
- A new brazeless tube joint, formed by drilling and threading the lug and pouring a low-melting liquid metal around a rolled depression in the tube end, promised a cheap, strong mechanical connection without altering frame construction.
- The District of Columbia court of appeals reversed a lower-court ruling against Fred Moore, a bicycle-firm employee who had tested Washington's regulation banning handlebars set more than four inches below the saddle, and ordered a new trial.
- The United States Rubber Co.'s executive committee voted to continue paying full wages to any employee who entered military or naval service in the war with Spain and to hold their jobs open until an honorable discharge.
- An unsigned editorial traced the rapid growth of independent parts manufacturers supplying rims, saddles, tires and pedals to both large and small bicycle makers, arguing that big concerns' new practice of placing bulk orders with parts makers was reshaping the trade without necessarily freezing out the small builder.
- A companion editorial credited the season's abandonment of 'trading-in' second-hand machines as real progress, noting most dealers now refused old wheels in trade altogether and had quickly resold what stock they did take rather than let it pile up.
- A Cycle Age reporter interviewed a big-city dealer who does ninety percent of his business on time payments, describing his chattel-mortgage forms, his practice of timing installments to a buyer's payday, and his tactics for handling customers who try to dodge a debt with a lawyer's help.
- A technical feature by Hugh Dolnar examined four-wheel motocycle running-gear design and the compensating (differential) gear needed on curves, weighing the case for varying motor speed against a separate change-gear between motor and driving wheels, as favored by French and German builders.
- A critique of retail bicycle advertisements used five sample cuts — including ones for the George Worthington Co. and an Oroville, California repair shop — to fault jumbled type styles and cramped copy, and to recommend plain, uniform Roman type for legibility.
- A report on Italy's cycling trade described well-built Venetian provincial roads, eleven domestic factories turning out inferior-material machines, a $9-per-bicycle import duty, and the opportunity for American makers to sell stylish wheels through a general agency working with clubs like the Touring Club and Unione Velocipedistica Italiana.
- A department-store bicycle clerk who sold cheap machines by day admitted, once off the clock, that he rode a $50 'Blank' himself and considered it unbeatable, illustrating how even discount salesmen become converts once they own a genuinely good wheel.
- A German process described by the U.S. consul at Bremen mixed soda lye, fatty matter and petroleum refuse into molded briquettes, offering a way to use up waste rock-oil residue as fuel.
- Philadelphia watchmaker Joseph Figarotta built a fully working miniature bicycle weighing just over two ounces, complete with lantern, pneumatic tires and nameplate, displayed in a glass case engraved with its tiny dimensions.
- The regular patents column described a lathe grinding/boring attachment by Albert J. Farmer, McGill's wedge-action saddle post, a dust-proof hub and spoke design by Joseph Meyrick, several new back-pedaling brakes including Heath's, Fader's, Bailey's improved brake and Dinkle's, plus Stover's crank design and a McDermott driving gear.
- A San Francisco dispatch found the cycle trade outlook weaker in drought-hit California than in rain-favored Oregon and Washington, though price cuts kept local demand active, and reported the re-election of secretary James M. Hamilton at the San Francisco Cycle Board of Trade.
- A Louisville bicycle dealer's string of attention-grabbing stunts — a 400-foot trackside signboard at the 1896 national meet, band uniforms matching his bicycle's enamel color, and a giant hilltop billboard that drew a park commissioner's complaint before its unveiling — made him, by local repute, a natural advertising manager.
- The buyers' notes column rounded up new trade products, including the Rose Mfg. Co.'s Neverout kerosene lamp, the J. J. Warren Co.'s leather-covered grip, the Eagle Bicycle Mfg. Co.'s dealer 'Buyers' Guide' on enameling, the $85 Luthy Special, the Elwood cycle stand, and the Morse chain's friction-reducing pointed chain blocks.
- Chicago corporation counsel William H. Arthur, judging the Manson Cycle Co.'s four-line jingle contest for its 'Manson Three Crown' model, awarded first prize to the Rev. Amos Sanders of Noblesville, Indiana, whose verse and grateful reply to the company were both printed in full.
- Kangaroo tires were adopted this year by National Cycle Track Association racers Linton, McDuffee, Tom Butler, Coulter, 'Doc' Brown, Tom Barnaby, and the Denver and English champion tandem teams.
- Short trade items reported the Western Rubber Co. of Indianapolis taking over the Indiana Bicycle Co.'s rubber department to make licensed G. & J. tires, a $25,000 fire loss at the Victor Mfg. Co. plant in Aliquippa, Pa., and continuing bicycle auctions by Ezekiel & Bernheim in Cincinnati.
- A letter from the Fairbanks-Boston Rim Co. traced five years of competition between laminated (rock maple) and one-piece (originally elm, now also maple) wood rims, arguing the laminated rim's equal spoke tension and freedom from breakage made it the choice for racing wheels and detachable-tire machines like the Dunlop.
- The Frost Gear Case Co. of Indianapolis explained the crank and sprocket clearance needed to fit its detachable American-style gear case to bicycles with spider cranks, Fauber or Columbia bosses, and rear hub brakes such as the Willitts, New Departure, Pope and Eclipse coaster brake.
- A news roundup covered the War Department's new interest in bicycles for the signal corps amid the Spanish war, a rained- and snowed-out National Circuit opening at Louisville's rebuilt Auditorium track, the Canadian Wheelmen's Association moving its official organ to Toronto, and a fresh racing-board sanction fight involving the Harlem and Riverside Wheelmen.
- A practical guide urged uniform state road ordinances (citing a new New York law on sidewalk riding, bells and speed), condemned a proposed Philadelphia ordinance limiting downtown cyclists to four miles an hour, and set out rules for patching macadam depressions and draining roadbeds to prevent ruts.
- Thirteen Chicago League and Associated Cycling Clubs delegates toured Indianapolis by wheel over the Broad Ripple cycle path, visited the state volunteer camp at the Fair Grounds, and began planning a mass Chicago-to-Indianapolis tour, via a Lake Michigan steamer to Michigan City, for the August League meet.
- A New York dispatch covered training at the newly completed Ambrose Park track, trainer Tom Eck's reports on his fast French rider Bourotte outpacing training partners, Charley Miller's terms for paced match races in Berlin and Paris, and the Atlanta Wheelmen's plans to promote both the Irvington-Milburn road race and a Decoration Day track meet.
- A Minneapolis dispatch reported that L.A.W. state counsel A. B. Ovitt, the wheelmen's candidate and father of the city's cycle-path building, was defeated for the state assembly despite a huge wheelmen's turnout at Camp Ramsey, and described planned five-day club tours by wheel from Minneapolis and St. Paul to the Omaha Trans-Mississippi Exposition.
- Tacoma, Washington wheelmen, funded by a self-imposed $1-per-rider tax, built twenty-five miles of hillside cycle paths and the world's largest exclusive bicycle bridge — a 330-foot fir-timber span 110 feet high — and were extending a path forty-five miles toward Mount Tacoma's Paradise Valley.
- A London dispatch quoted Dunlop team riders Walters and Armstrong dismissing American press claims that Jimmy Michael was a 'world beater,' rating his rides inferior to his earlier European record performances, and praising Tom Linton as the finest racing man they had seen.
- A New York dispatch blamed L.A.W. Racing Board chairman Albert Mott and board member Wait for a tangle of conflicting sanctions that led the Harlem Wheelmen to refuse to run the state championship meet after a rival Riverside Wheelmen date was granted for the same day at Ambrose Park.
- A Washington dispatch reported that Chief Signal Officer Gen. A. W. Greely had contracted with three manufacturers for field-service bicycles for the signal corps under the Spanish war appropriation, alongside a Maryland wheelmen's plan to build a cycle path from Chambersburg to Hagerstown and a District bill making it a misdemeanor to 'borrow' a bicycle left on the street.
- The Canadian Wheelmen's Association voted to move its official paper from Simcoe to Toronto under new editor-in-chief Joseph Clark, retaining longtime secretary-treasurer H. B. Donly, and took up bettering U.S. customs regulations with President Beament to confer with L.A.W. president Potter in Washington.
- The American Cycle Racing Association published its season schedule of match races and pacemaking teams for stars Edouard Taylore, Major Taylor and F. J. Titus, with Philadelphia's Willow Grove track leading with twelve dates ahead of New York's Manhattan Beach, Rochester's Culver Park and Boston's Waltham track.
- Frank Starbuck, who would ride a Pierce that season, was recalled as having won his famous 1897 defeat of Jimmy Michael at Willow Grove on a chainless wheel yet nearly went broke unable to pay his pacemakers, and had long complained of being forced into important races on a heavy road wheel rather than a proper racer.