The Cycle Age and Trade Review, Vol 25, No 132
Articles in this issue
- Washington bicycle dealers reported moderate but improving retail business, with dealers who had added summer sporting goods and vacation equipment as sidelines finding those lines particularly profitable, while weekly window display changes were credited with attracting customers to showrooms.
- A London trade correspondent reported that the American Bicycle Company's London office was in administrative chaos, with a succession of organizers dismissed or replaced, correspondence in disarray, and one dismissed employee demanding breach-of-contract damages and threatening violence.
- Attorneys for Waltham Mfg. Co.'s Charles Metz commenced suit against the American Bicycle Company in Boston federal court for infringement of broad pedal patents covering the type of tubular cross-arm pedal then nearly universal in the industry, with further suits against other alleged infringers said to be in preparation.
- William Rooke, general manager of the bicycle department of the Butler Co. of Butler, Indiana, died suddenly; the widely traveled Englishman had previously served as secretary of the Buffalo Cycle Co. and had presided over remarkable growth at the Butler Co. during his brief tenure.
- A report that undischarged bankrupt Ernest Terah Hooley had secured a Russian gold field concession from the Czar was quickly denied, prompting the Cycle Trader of London to recall the extraordinary scale of the financial ruin and scandal Hooley had left in the British cycle trade.
- Free wheels were beginning to gain acceptance in New South Wales and Victoria, retarded mainly by the $15 fitting surcharge, while the Bowden rim brake was growing popular, a new cycle factory had started in Ballarat, and assembled machines built from American parts were winning major Australian championships.
- Profiles of successful bicycle dealers included Bengtson Bros. of Rockford, who grew from six machines in their first year to hundreds annually over nine years, and Phelps & Brenner of Quincy, who expanded from a 10x20 foot shop to lead their city in bicycle and sewing machine sales.
- W.F. Stafford of Boston and Harry E. Miles of Lynn were killed when their motor tandem pacing Stinson in a twenty-mile race ran off the track at Waltham and collided with electric light poles before 15,000 spectators, in what was described as the most terrible accident in cycling history.