The Cycle Age and Trade Review, Vol 25, No 130
Articles in this issue
- A.B.C. patent attorney Redding dismissed the Snyder company's plea that the American Bicycle Company was an illegal combination lacking standing to sue as a mere delaying tactic, while confirming that he and opposing counsel planned to travel to Europe in July to gather further testimony for the Eagle bottom bracket case.
- Consul General DuBois at St. Gall, Switzerland suggested American firms exhibiting at the Paris Exposition send printed cards to consular officers so they could be distributed to interested Swiss merchants in hardware, automobiles, photographic supplies and other trades likely to want American goods.
- The American Bicycle Company quietly dismantled the Columbus Bicycle Co. plant and threw more than 300 workers out of employment, with the closure expected to provoke a backlash of anti-trust sentiment among Columbus's well-organized labor community.
- Atlanta bicycle dealers reported the best trading season ever seen in the South, with the sole dealer who advertised exclusively as 'not in the trust' doubling his sales compared to the same period the prior year, including equipping the city's entire mounted police department with Eagle bicycles at the chief's explicit request to avoid trust products.
- The largest cycle establishment in Baltimore described how it built a profitable repair department generating $500 per month, maintained discipline with customers who tried to loiter, managed installment sales systematically, and credited its success to carrying the Orient as a leading independent line over trust machines.
- A Rome, N.Y. dispatch corrected an earlier report, clarifying that dealer W. S. Birnie (not A. S. Noonan) doubted the chainless bicycle's success, while Noonan reported brisk sales of Stearns and Wolff-American Sager-gear chainless machines; Colorado Springs dealer L. O. Wahl, who sells independent makes exclusively, separately warned manufacturers that overcrowding agents in one territory was making the bicycle business unsustainable for live dealers.
- An essay argued that a successful dealer's job is to plan, watch and direct rather than perform every task personally, since a business owner who lets details master him loses control of the business and ceases to progress.
- A Cleveland dispatch found the backward, cold spring slowing bicycle sales generally, but reported that dealers displaying the Cycle Age's 'Our Bicycles Are Not Made By a Trust' poster saw clear gains — the Hoffman Bicycle Co. citing a 20 percent increase — with the anti-trust message especially effective in working-class districts served by dealers like the Lamont Cycle Co. (Pierce) and C. H. Merkle (Orient).
- Omaha dealers reported unprecedented demand despite a slow, rainy start to the season, with one manager selling 141 machines in April alone, growing interest in women's models, and no exposition this year to compete for evening leisure time.
- The Laminated Tube Co.'s new Columbus, Ohio factory began production of its patented brass-lined laminated tubing, with inquiries already received from Finland and Europe and plans to add machinery for a patented automobile wheel once bicycle orders are filled.
- Following his earlier report, Consul-General Rounsevelle Wildman described how a nameless-brand consignment of sixteen American bicycles sent to test the Hong Kong market fetched only $26 to $43 each at auction, undermined by unmarked nameplates, low handlebars unsuited to local riders' upright style, incomplete tool bags and porous, easily-punctured tires.
- An editorial urged bicycle repairers to keep both their shops and their personal appearance presentable to attract women customers, arguing that grimy hands and an apron signal honest labor while a shabby, unwashed outfit repels lady patrons regardless of a shop's neatness.
- Dealers from Lincoln, Neb. to Memphis, Tenn. described their advertising tactics in letters to the editor, including the Crescent Cycle Co.'s upside-down newspaper teaser ads building to a bicycle raffle, Pritchard & Powers' messenger-boy sign boards, and John F. Donohue's popular 'Wheeling Trips' distance cards, alongside reports of growing anti-trust sentiment and independent-line sales from Providence to El Paso.
- A correspondent described how a Barnes-riding customer's order for a black Barnes chainless was delayed thirty-two days because the local Barnes agency routed shipments through the rival Stearns agency in Syracuse, which the Barnes agent said systematically slow-walked deliveries of machines not bearing the Stearns name.
- A Portland dealer recalled Joseph L. Yost's earlier investigation into a Pacific coast bicycle factory and argued the trust's arbitrary refusal to ship wheels without specific tires, or with tires dealers actually wanted, was driving business to independent makers on the coast.
- An Oneida, N.Y. dealer, weary of the American Bicycle Co. shipping only 'culls' after weeks of delay, switched to selling Eagle bicycles delivered the same week ordered, noting few of Oneida's twenty-five cycle agents planned to sell A.B.C. machines next year; John S. Newberry of Romeo, Mich. separately reported the Featherstone sales department shrugging off his sale of leftover 1900 Tribunes at cost.
- A traveling dealer touring several states by automobile reported that antagonism toward the trust was widespread but muted, with dealers privately favoring independent machines for better terms and less risk of losing an agency, while publicly biding their time; separately, Toronto's Antelope bicycle maker Jas. Lockrie reported a 2,500-machine, union-labor-made output selling out by mid-June without competing directly with the two Canadian trusts.
- U.S. Consul General Frank H. Mason at Berlin warned American exporters against dumping surplus stock in Germany, urging instead branch houses or exclusive agencies backed by good-faith credit terms, German-language catalogues priced in marks, and c.i.f. quotes to named German ports rather than f.o.b. New York.
- Trade notes reported the Traders' Cycle & Supply Co. of Chicago renaming itself the Western Golfer Co., Horace Partridge & Co. of Boston being petitioned into bankruptcy, three plainclothes bicycle detectives assigned by Chicago police to curb a wave of bicycle theft, and a British court ruling the Wapshare tire did not infringe Dunlop's Welch patents.
- The Banker Bros. Cycle Co. of Pittsburgh, run by former racing champion George A. Banker and his brother Arthur, secured the sole U.S. agency for the Werner Bros. Moto Cyclette, a 65-pound gasoline-engined motor bicycle built in Paris, with Banker personally test-riding each machine before shipment.
- The mechanical column covered a flat-topped ram's-horn handlebar offering two comfortable hand positions, a reader's complaint about needlessly heavy stock handlebar stems, a cleanly-ventilated factory grinding room with suction-fan dust removal, and a shop-made fixture for grinding a spherical punch face on a bench lathe.
- An editorial mocked a fresh batch of patents for a handlebar wind-and-insect screen and 'punctureless' spring- and rubber-filled tires, blaming patent attorneys who profit from clients' worthless inventions, and noted the week's only plausible new patents were an English gear case and a Chicago-invented detachable dress and mud guard.
- A Cycle Age reporter toured a department store's bicycle department incognito, recording a coaster-brake salesman's garbled explanation of hub momentum, a lamp salesman's nonsensical pitch about 'parabolic' reflector plating and gas-pressure water valves, and a cement salesman puncturing and re-plugging the same tire all afternoon to demonstrate an easy repair.
- The buyers' column described the Seal Lock Co.'s O.K. acetylene lamp with cloth-bagged carbide charges, the Avery & Jeness two-piece A. & J. hanger retrofittable to old machines, Mackie-Lovejoy's telescoping 'Giant' pocket foot pump, P. O. Dwyer's folding bicycle already adopted by several foreign armies including in South Africa, and Holroyd & Co.'s cross-bored crank hanger taps.
- A sport-news roundup covered Harry Elkes' upset of Edouard Taylor in their first Paris meeting days after Taylor's 38-mile hour record, the Detroit Cycle Board of Trade's $2,500 prize purse for its Decoration Day Belle Isle road races, Chicago wheelmen's push for a drainage-canal speedway from Chicago to Lockport, and objections to running the L.A.W. national meet's races on an indoor board track in Milwaukee's Exposition building.
- In a 100-kilometer paced race on the Prince track in Paris, Edouard Taylor set new world records from ten kilometers through the hour (nearly 39 miles, 62 km 313 m) before tire trouble forced him out at fifty miles, letting Bouhours win the race itself in 1:39:13 3/5, breaking his own prior 100-km record by over eight minutes.
- A Newark, N.J. dispatch reported a Sunday crowd of nearly 5,000 at the Vailsburg track, with Fisher and Eaton winning the professional handicaps and amateur Collett taking the half-mile open, while English cyclists organized to press Parliament over railway companies' refusal to properly carry bicycles.
- Chicago ex-amateur John Nelson made his professional debut in a twenty-five-mile paced match race against Charles Porter at Cincinnati, losing by five lengths in 56:50 2/5 after both riders' pacing machines broke down, in a race that inaugurated Sunday racing in the city.