The Cycle, Vol 2, No 15
Articles in this issue
- Daisie collects women's mileage reports for 1886: 'Avonia' of Chicago logged under 200 miles on the boulevards; Miss M. of Buffalo rode 613 miles including runs to Niagara Falls; and a third correspondent—recovering from nervous prostration—built from 200 miles in 1884 to 600 in 1886, crediting the tricycle with restoring her health.
- Will Pitman announces a 30×60-inch Smyrna rug featuring the League badge and cycling emblems, to retail at five dollars with the first order placed by New York's Chief Consul George R. Bidwell.
- A profile of the Cambridge Club rider who set a 100-mile road record in October 1884 and went on to race with the elite Eastern Massachusetts coterie of Rowe, Rhodes, McCurdy and Burnham; now riding for Gormully & Jeffery in Chicago, his best mile stands at 2.43 on the Indianapolis track.
- The Baltimore Cycle Club hosted 1,000–1,500 visitors on Christmas Day, with President Abbott greeting guests personally and the mayor attending alongside city dignitaries—leaving a strong impression that cycling was a serious institution deserving political notice.
- Secretary Edward J. Shriver reports New York Bicycle Club members' 1886 mileage totals—F. M. Daniels leading at 2,063 miles—covering routes through eleven New York counties plus Vermont, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Bermuda.
- A summary of Mr. G. Stoney's paper to the Dublin University Experimental Association on rubber-tyre grip: he measured a coefficient of adhesion of about 0.6 on good roads at the Knockmaroon Hill climb, found iron tyres superior on wet and muddy surfaces, and showed that rear-driving machines have a decisive advantage on steep hills.
- An extract from Jo Pennell's Pall Mall Gazette piece arguing that makers' amateurs who cannot maintain their amateur status are wrongly seeking to drag all cyclists into the professional ranks—likening it to a professional jockey declaring that anyone who rides a horse must join him.
- Practical tips from four riders—Goulding, Wale, Tweed, and Staines—on mounting an ordinary bicycle by the pedal, each recommending variants of running alongside the machine, placing the left foot on the lowest pedal position, and springing across the saddle.
- A comic diary charting the collapse of New Year's resolutions month by month: the January pledge to abstain from drink, tobacco, and slang, rise at five, and ride 5,000 miles quietly unravels by April into 'It's too big a contract.'
- Van Horn of Denver, coasting an unbraked descent into Denver, found the bridge over an irrigation ditch gone; a protruding stone launched him and his Apollo bicycle across the ditch unharmed—a story he keeps alive with the stone displayed in a glass case.
- The chairman of the San Francisco Bicycle Club's reception committee writes to Outing confirming arrangements for welcoming around-the-world cyclist Thomas Stevens: the Olympic Club has joined the reception, quarantine and customs access has been secured, and a banquet is planned at the Olympic Club rooms.
- J. B. McCune of the Springfield Bicycle Manufacturing Company confirms that champion racer George M. Hendee has contracted to represent the Springfield Roadster from 1 January, with 160 orders already in hand and production raised to 3,000 machines for the year.
- A four-stanza poem by Mary Sargent of Boston, sent as a Christmas remembrance for the Cycle's women's columnist 'Daisie,' contrasting summer's passing glories with the enduring brightness of the winter daisy.
- An allegorical fable in which a man's attempt to 'cure' a crooked toe by cutting it off is rejected—standing as a parable against the abolition of amateurism, concluding that a poor amateur law is better than none at all.
- O. S. Barrett of Adrian, Michigan, paralysed from a Gettysburg leg wound, describes how Singer's Velociman tricycle restored his mobility to ten or twelve miles an hour through city streets despite having no use of the lower body.
- Dr. Jaeger's 'wind-stoppers'—elastic woollen sleeves sewn inside a coat to seal the wrists against cold air—are recommended for winter cycling as a lighter and less unsightly alternative to gauntlets, available for a few pence a pair.
- The New York Central Railroad announces it will carry bicycles free of charge in baggage cars of local trains when accompanied by the owner holding a first-class ticket, provided the machine is checked at least ten minutes before departure and liability is released.
- Charles E. Clay, writing in the January Outing, warns that tobacco is the most pernicious substance for a cyclist's wind, noting that professional athletes in rowing, running, boxing, and swimming are barred even from breathing tobacco fumes during hard training.
- A utopian fiction by '5678' set in the year 2000, describing a colony of 200 American families who established a cycling-centred society on a remote island in 1900 and over four generations produced a physically and intellectually superior race through compulsory cycling, regulated diet, and comprehensive schooling.
- A correspondent argues that the League's annual meet should be held the third week of May in St. Louis, when the weather is reliably good and local wheelmen are more able to attend than later in the month.
- A letter from '8,427 L.A.W., Ex-Captain Second Oldest Club in America' corrects the claim that Washington's Capital Bicycle Club is the second-oldest wheeling organisation in the country, citing the San Francisco Bicycle Club's founding on 28 November 1878, and reports preparations to receive Thomas Stevens on his return from his round-the-world ride.
- Captain Verney, R.N., proposes a Yale-style key fitted to the tricycle axle that would release a bolt and immobilise the wheel when removed, as a more practical security device than the current padlock-and-chain.
- A column of short items: the poem 'Signs of the Season' by 'Cap.' cataloguing the markers of winter in cycling clubs; brief notes on Pittsburg mileage records, Hendee's lever machine, the Wheel World's planned rebranding as Olympia, W. W. Sheen's 7,450-mile Star record, and the Delaware L.A.W. Division's formation.