The Cycle Age and Trade Review, Vol 25, No 147
Articles in this issue
- Motor Age magazine announced a Chicago automobile exhibition for the last week of March 1901 in the new Coliseum on Wabash Avenue, offering fifty percent more floor space than Madison Square Garden and a twenty-foot demonstration track, while a competing Inter-Ocean auto show was also drawing bicycle trade exhibitors for a race meet at Washington Park that same week.
- Bicycling World, the pioneer American cycling journal founded in 1877, purchased The Wheel from Frank Prial and renamed itself 'The Bicycling World and Motocycle Review,' consolidating the eastern cycling press down to a single title, with Prial exiting cycling journalism entirely and retaining only his Liquor Trades Review.
- The Eclipse Mfg. Co., maker of the Morrow coaster brake, reorganized with a paid-up capital of $200,000 and centralized all shipping through a new New York office, reporting sales of 118,000 units in the past season and renewing its foreign distribution contract with Green & Houk.
- Utica bicycle dealer C.H. Broadbent reported that after a full season of daily use, his Orient four-wheel motorycle had given no trouble and predicted the motor vehicle business would replicate the bicycle boom of 1895-97, with the Orient brand considered a year ahead of all other makes.
- E.K. Baker of Baker & Rutherford, sole bicycle merchants in Paris, Tex., described trade conditions where medium prices and limited profits prevailed, and outlined a successful bicycle club installment scheme operated by the Cleveland agent in Evansville, Ind., which had been adapted from practices described in a previous issue.
- The Cycle Age editorialized that 1900 had produced fewer novelties in cycle sundries than any recent year, with the number of new patents and commercial product introductions both down, attributing the slowdown partly to the trade's depressed condition and partly to the maturing of the bicycle market.
- A critical examination of the motor bicycle question argued that commercially successful machines had to meet demanding requirements — narrow track width, motor-to-wheel disconnection capability, free-pedal coaster hubs, and careful brake provisions — that the experimental machines of the day consistently failed to satisfy.
- Only three bicycle patents were granted for the week ending September 4, an unusually small number compared to normal; the batch included a carrier cycle, an adjustable handlebar, and a pedal rubber, none of significant commercial importance.
- A practical guide for cycle retailers argued that success depended on hard work and careful management of all business factors, not on any single technique, citing the many failures caused by poor credit practices, underestimated overhead costs, and insufficient attention to the fundamentals of store operations.
- The sports column criticized the New York Journal's sensationalist coverage of Miss Jane Yatman's bicycle ride from New York to Chicago in just over ten days, arguing that the popular press treated women cyclists as spectacle rather than as athletic participants deserving serious coverage.
- National circuit races at Newby Oval, Indianapolis, saw the final of the one-third-mile national championship declared a dead heat between Major Taylor and Kimble; the column also covered other domestic and European results including races from the week's program.
- 'Pop' Elkes returned from Europe reporting that Harry Elkes had been compelled to leave because the foreign company contracting him repeatedly broke its agreements, and described the difficulties facing American riders abroad, noting that Jacquelin was capable of beating any man in the world including Cooper.