The Cycle Age and Trade Review, Vol 25, No 145
Articles in this issue
- Further details emerged on the Central Distributing Co. of Buffalo, revealed as a selling agency controlled by the Excelsior, Grant, Cleveland Ball & Screw, and Steel Ball companies with E.A. Jones as president; separately, the Grant Ball Co. accepted an offer to relocate its plant to Franklin, Pennsylvania, with plans for a larger factory and increased production.
- Leading Philadelphia bicycle dealers — including the former Columbia, Stearns, Victor, and Crescent agents — were preparing to add automobile and motorcycle lines to their businesses, with rumors that the city's annual cycle show would be replaced by an automobile exposition the following winter.
- The Cycle Age accused the British trade paper 'The Cyclist' of deliberately distorting a letter from an American enthusiast to suggest that educated American riders considered domestic bicycles inferior, part of a pattern of biased anti-American reporting it had previously noted when the paper compared a $25 Belgian bicycle with a $60 English machine and presented the result as an American-versus-English comparison.
- Jobbers in northwestern states reported that sharply reduced bicycle prices had created unexpectedly strong demand in farming communities previously priced out of the market, with good harvest conditions allowing rural consumers to enter the bicycle market for the first time as the fall selling season approached.
- The patent column described McKenzie's seat post clamp with an annular wedge mechanism for quick adjustment without screw-thread action, dismissed a German folding bicycle invention as impractical, and reviewed a spun-gear chainless bicycle design using pressed rather than machined gear components to reduce manufacturing cost.
- The paper followed up on its spoke-standardization campaign by arguing that the trade's near-unanimous response to the 32-hole proposal demonstrated the broader possibility of standardizing bicycle dimensions and fittings, citing as evidence of the urgent need a story about $40,000 worth of forming tools lying idle in one factory because no other maker used the same specifications.
- The paper recounted with dry humor its weekly encounter with yet another patented kick-release bicycle support device, describing the inventor's conviction that his gas-pipe contraption was a world-beater while illustrating the seemingly inexhaustible human impulse to patent solutions to the problem of keeping an unattended bicycle upright.
- A technical article on electric welding described the range of operations the process made possible in cycle manufacture, including joining pieces of different-grade steel into seamless finished products, welding brass wire, and working with metals otherwise refractory to ordinary furnace heat, illustrated with samples of electrically welded components.
- The sport section opened by looking back to the first international cycling race meet at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, comparing the limited international participation in that pioneer event with the much broader field assembled for the Paris championships of 1900, and drawing lessons about how the sport's global organization had developed in the intervening years.
- The program for the Austral Wheel Race in Sydney offered $5,000 in aggregate prizes over three Saturdays in December at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, with the organizing committee actively soliciting foreign entries while reporting that Australian champion 'Bill' Martin would not be returning from his overseas campaign.
- Detailed results from the first day of the International Cyclists' Union world championships at the Parc des Princes described how Cooper ran third in a semi-final and Lake misjudged his sprint too late, confirming that the Americans had failed to reach the finals of the events ultimately dominated by French riders.
- In his second motor-paced match with Nelson at Pleasure Beach in Bridgeport, Jimmy Michael rode so poorly that he sat up and abandoned the race in the seventh mile, unable to maintain contact with Nelson's relentless pace despite repeated urging from his pacing crew — a defeat that effectively ended his viability as a match-race attraction.