History
In 1894 Annie "Londonderry" Kopchovsky traveled "around the world" on a Sterling. Starting from Boston and heading west, her first bike was a Columbia but it proved unsuitable. In Chicago, the Sterling company gave her a men's Sterling (weighing 21 pounds, it had no brakes) which made riding in skirts impossible. She then wore bloomers and finally rode in a men's riding suit. Peter Zheutlin's book "Around the World on Two Wheels" records her journey. She claimed to be the first woman to "cycle around the world", duplicating a feat that Thomas Stevens had accomplished 10 years earlier. However, there was much controversy at the time as to whether she really had ridden her bicycle the entire way. In fact, she bicycled across the United States and France, and took steamships and trains the remainder of the way, while obscuring that fact in frequent newspaper accounts. Her ride came during the late 1800s "bicycle craze" and she gained widespread attention for her feat and for wearing bloomers (op cit).
In "The Works: The Industrial Architecture of the United States" (by Betsy Hunter Bradley - Oxford Press - Out of print?) a history of industrial buildings, the Sterling Cycle Works in Kenosha are cited by Harold Arnold ("engineer and industrial journalist") as an example of an 'open shop', a single story, unpartitioned machine shop. This dates the shop to Kenosha in 1895.
In 1898 Sterling won a Silver Medal at the Trans-Mississippi International Exposition held in Omaha, Nebraska for its "chainless bicycles and safeties".
In 1899, Sterling bikes were announced to be sold by the "American Bicycle Company" a consortium of 44 American bike and bike part manufacturers. Incorporation papers assert these 44 companies accounted for 60% of bicycles sold in the U.S. and that, in 1899, "661,000 wheels" were sold (ibid).
The 1899 Outing magazine lists Sterling's prices as "Chainless, for men and women, $75; racers, $65; roadsters, for men and women, $50; tandems, double diamond or combination, $75 or $85." The "chainless" drive is described as unique in that its longer connecting shaft connected the pinion to the rear sprocket gears back of the rear hub instead of in front of it.
The defunct Kenosha factory was sold to Thomas B. Jeffery in 1900 who turned it into one of the first automobile factories in the U.S.
The "Hand Book of the United States Tariff 1913 references the Sterling Cycle Works, again of Chicago as in importer of steel tubing.
Read more about this topic: Sterling Bicycle Co.
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.”
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“So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.”
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