AN AUTOMATIC PUMP.
A device that promises to save wheelmen much time and trouble is an automatic pump, operated upon the penny-in-the-slot principle. It is intended by the company controlling the patents and manufacturing the pump to place them at convenient points along the city and suburban routes for cyclists, for use by any wheelman who has the price of service—one cent. The machine is of sturdy construction, built to stand rough usage and rough weather. The dropping of a penny in the receiving slot releases a lever, one complete swing of which pumps the tire hard if the rider wishes it so, or a partial swing will give such pressure as is desired.
CHAPTER XV
FREAKS AND USELESS DEVICES.
Some one has defined a rebellion as a revolution which has not succeeded. Similarly, the freakishness or non-freakishness of an idea in cycle construction may be deemed to turn on its fate in the struggle for survival; yet there may be some exceptions to the rule of survival of the fittest, and, on the other hand, there are myriads of notions that are visionary as to possible practical results or even go counter to the most elementary of natural laws. A cycle show always brings out a few of the milder sort. For example, the Upright, devised by a non-rider who had observed with pain the “monkey-on-a-stick” position and perceived that this would be impossible if the hands must be at the sides; so this one-idea reformer devised a frame which placed the handle bar behind the rider, and the uprightness was complete. A few bicycles on this plan were made and went into use. The least that can be said is that the idea was effectually embodied; the most is that if one idea was enough in a bicycle this would have been triumphant and permanent. The last show had a freak or two in tires, a spur-gear freak in chainless driving (since remade into a form capable of operating), a device for driving the front wheel by a see-saw handlebar working straps and ratchets simultaneously with regular driving on the rear wheel—and some others we do not now recall. In the lack of a show, freaks do not come to the front as prominently this year, and yet they are still to be numbered by the thousand. They are to be found in witless, non-workable patents, besides many more by cranks who cannot raise the patent fees and are thus cruelly barred out of the Eden rightfully theirs if fate had been less unkind. Whether as much money has not been sunk in such patents and in barren experiment in the aggregate as has been made out of the bicycle is doubtful; at least, it is within bounds to say that the worthless patents in the cycle line taken out in the United States alone during the last twenty years could not be adequately described and illustrated in a month, even if this journal were entirely given up to the task. Yet we can sketch a few as samples; also indicating the lines along which barren contriving constantly runs.
DRIVING BY THE “RIDER’S WEIGHT.”