<\/p>\n
The invention of the safety bicycle early in the 1890’s caused almost as much excitement as did that of the Model T Ford automobile nearly a decade later. Suddenly in every community the status symbol was a bicycle. For some time the old high-wheeled cycles had been known, but they were so awkward and so hard to propel that few people had them, and no woman would think of trying to ride one.<\/p>\n
But the new bicycle, equipped with pneumatic tires on wheels of equal size, changed the picture. Everybody of both sexes now wanted the new means of locomotion.<\/p>\n
When they first appeared on the market, those safety bicycles were not cheap. In 1892 most of them were priced at $150. In 1894 they were down to $125, and the next year the price fell to an even hundred. A very active agent for bicycles in Waterville was Albert F. Drummond. Throughout his long life Mr. Drummond preserved the accounts of his bicycle agency, and what a picture they give us of the times.<\/p>\n
Mr. Drummond started as a salesman for E.S. Pendexter of Portland, who had the general agency for the State of Maine for Victor bicycles. In December, 1895 Pendexter wrote to Drummond: “How many catalogues and calendars shall I send you? They will be here in a few days, I expect.”<\/p>\n
Mr. Drummond’s commission was 20 per cent. So he made $20 on each one of those $100 Victors that he sold in 1895. During the spring and summer of that year the records show that he made more than 30 sales, Let us see who some of his customers were. Three of them were recent graduates of Colby in the Class of 1891: Franklin Johnson, the principal of Coburn, who many years later would be a Colby president; Norman Bassett, a young lawyer who would become a member of the Maine Supreme Court; and Will Smith, son of Colby’s professor of rhetoric, who would one day be the beloved pastor of Waterville’s Congregational Church. Other men who bought bikes from Bert Drummond were Horace Purinton, Dr. Bessey and Frank Marcia. And the girls were not forgotten. One of the ladies’ bikes went to Jessie Pepper, daughter of Colby’s former president, George Dana Boardman Pepper. Another was owned by Helen Plaisted. A third was listed as going to the “Redington girls”.<\/p>\n
Bert Drummond handled bicycle parts and appliances as well as whole machines.<\/p>\n
Something was always going wrong with those early bikes, and Bert had just the things on hand to fix them. Among his listed sales were a sprocket $2.00, a hanger axle $1.25, a cyclometer $1.50, a repair kit for inner tubes $2.00, a saddle $2.60, and a pair of cork grips $1.00. His sales included numerous small items, such as chain links, bolts and nuts, valve stems, oil cup caps, pedals, seat pads, pant guards, pumps and clamps.<\/p>\n
Not all of Drummond’s invoices came from Pendexter. Some were issued directly by the maker of Victor bicycles, the Overman Wheel Company of Chicopee Falls, Mass.<\/p>\n
By 1895 that company did business allover the nation. Their letterhead announced branch offices in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, New Orleans, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon.<\/p>\n
According to his account book, just once did Bert Drummond extend his vehicle business beyond the sale of bicycles. In August, 1895 he was billed for a pneumatic sulky and a set of sulky attachments. It would be interesting to know to whom he sold that equipment.<\/p>\n
It was in 1896, the year after his big business in bicycles, that Bert Drummond built his new home at the corner of Morrill Avenue and Burleigh Street. The house was built by A.G. Bowie and cost $3,300. How far a dollar would go in those good old days is revealed by the careful record Mr. Drummond kept of expenses in building his fine new home. Skilled carpenters got $2.50 for a ten hour day, or 25 cents an hour. Birch treads for the front stairs cost six dollars. In his den Bert wanted a book case built along one whole wall. Its 130 feet of lumber cost him $6.50, and he paid a carpenter $2.00 to build it — $8.50 for a book case that lasted Mr. Drummond’s lifetime.<\/p>\n
H.D. Pierce of Ash Street had the job of painting and papering all the rooms in the new Drummond home. His per hour charge was 23t cents, and he worked, not the carpenters’ ten hours, but a longer twelve hour day. His bill for interior decoration of the whole house, including the price of paper and paint, was $117.25. Twenty-one window screens and four screen doors cost Mr. Drummond $53.65, and he paid two cents apiece for 36 pickets for his fence. When it was all done, Bert and Josephine Drummond had one of the finest homes west of Elm Street.<\/p>\n
About ten years before Bert Drummond was born, his great-uncle, the celebrated Josiah Drummond, had not yet left Waterville to pursue his brilliant legal career in Portland. It was in 1857 that Josiah Drummond led the movement to free the Ticonic Bridge. Since 1825 successive wooden bridges had been built between Waterville and Winslow as, one after another, they were washed away by floods. All of those bridges were built by corporations whose stock was sold to individuals, and who collected tolls to meet expenses as well as, hopefully, to pay dividends on the stock.<\/p>\n
Allover Maine in the 1850’s movement for free bridges was spreading. The plan usually followed was to persuade the holders of stock to turn in their certificates as contributions, then hand the bridge over to the town, which would thereafter maintain it as they did the roads. In 1857 the Ticonic Bridge was in very bad repair and had to be rebuilt. Mr. Drummond was convinced that the time had come to build an iron bridge. On June 17 he wrote to J.M. Stubbs of Bangor: “I am informed that in your town you are building an iron bridge. We have occasion to build some kind of bridge here and, if you will give me information about the cost, etc., or hand this letter to someone who will do so, you will confer a great favor. We desire to know what a suspension bridge 250 feet long will cost, under the same circumstances. Perhaps, if there is someone at work on your bridge, he can give all the information we des ire.”<\/p>\n
The old Ticonic Bridge had to be repaired so often and proved so expensive to keep up that the stockholders were quite ready to call it a day, turn in their certificates and dissolve the corporation. But where would the money come from to build a new bridge? The two towns of Waterville and Winslow couldn’t raise it by taxation. Too many voters on both sides of the river declared they would swim across before they would ever vote to tax themselves to build an expensive iron bridge.<\/p>\n
So Josiah Drummond resorted to public subscription. He believed there were enough public spirited citizens who would give the necessary money, and he proved to be right. The subscription paper that he circulated in the summer of 1857 was worded as follows: “We the undersigned, each in consideration of the promises of others, hereby severally agree to pay to such persons as may be appointed, the sums set against our respective names, for the purpose of building a free bridge across the Kennebec River between Waterville and Winslow, and to pay said sum at such times as said persons shall appoint, and any surplus to constitute a fund to keep the bridge in repair.”<\/p>\n
One of the largest subscribers was the dry goods firm of Meader and Phillips, in which the partners were members of two of Waterville’s leading families. Edward Meader had married the daughter of Waterville’s celebrated General Franklin Smith. Their daughter Emily, more commonly called Peace Meader, was one of the first women graduates of Colby. George Phillips, after serving with his father in a general store, became a partner of Mr. Meader in 1848. The firm of Meader and Phillips gave $200 toward the free bridge. Elden and Herrick was the only other firm or individual to give a similar amount.<\/p>\n
One hundred dollar subscribers included J.H. Percival, Stephen Frye, Samuel Appleton, Dr. Nathaniel Boutelle and Josiah Drummond himself. Among the $50 subscribers were Charles Mathews, the bookseller, J.H. Plaisted, G.A. Foster and William Chipman. Many subscriptions were as small as $10, but when they were all collected they were sufficient to build the new iron bridge and to declare it free from toll.<\/p>\n
Another member of the Drummond family was John C. Drummond of Winslow. A young man in 1852, he kept an interesting account of his expenses. Only three years earlier the railroad had come to Waterville, On November 9, 1852 John Drummond wrote: “I paid to the ticket master at the depot in Waterville $1.50 for a ticket to Danville Junction, and there I paid 40 cents for a ticket up to Oxford on the Atlantic & St. Lawrence R.R. I paid to the company store of King & Perkins five cents for a bottle of ink to write letters.”<\/p>\n
Some of the purchases made by John Drummond were a suit that cost him $2.90. He itemized it as $1.25 for the coat, 75 cents for the vest, and 90 cents for the pants. He paid $1.40 for a pair of shoes.<\/p>\n
On August 17 he recorded: “I paid Captain George Jewell 25 cents for a passage in his boat from Waterville to Hallowell down the Kennebec. I let the cook have 5 cents at Augusta when I went aboard the Schooner Henrietta.”<\/p>\n
John Drummond ventured outside of Maine. He went to Massachusetts on the Henrietta, for on August 31 he wrote: “I paid three cents for some apples in Marblehead across the harbor from Salem, while ashore.”<\/p>\n
A month later John was in Albany, N.Y. where “I paid three cents for a knot of yarn to darn my stockings.”<\/p>\n
On October 7 John was back in Maine: “Paid 50 cents for supper and lodging at the Hallowell House.” The next day he paid 25 cents for passage up the Kennebec in Captain Jewell’s steamer Clinton. That boat landed him at the wharf on the Waterville side, and it cost him two cents to walk over the toll bridge to his home in Winslow.<\/p>\n
Since we began this broadcast with reference to Bert Drummond’s bicycle agency, let us end it with some general information about early bicycles. The old high wheeled bicycle, after the invention of the modern bike was called the standard, high-wheeled ordinary. Sometimes the front wheel was five feet in diameter while the rear wheel seldom exceeded 18 inches. The first of those really old bikes appeared in 1870. In 1886 James Stanley brought out the predecessor to the modern safety bicycle. a machine he called the Rover with a chain-driven rear wheel. It was the first bike to have pneumatic tires. The tandem bike became a success in 1894. The Gay Nineties were made excitingly gayer by the bicycle craze that hit all America with a wallop. People went bicycle-mad. and the industry enjoyed a tremendous boom. It is interesting to see what happened to prices caused chiefly by the competition between many manufacturers. As I told you at the start of this broadcast, between 1892 and 1895. the price of a bicycle dropped from $150 to $100. Year by year the price continued to fall, until early in the new century it was possible to buy a standard, full-equipped bike for $25.<\/p>\n
Arthur Palmer in his book “The Story of the Bicycle” says: “The combination of the safety bicycle and the pneumatic tire was responsible for the big boom. From being a fashionable diversion of the rich in 1890. it became a means of locomotion for the middle and even the lower classes of American society.”<\/p>\n
Year: 1966<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #692, Broadcast on May 22, 1966<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42954,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8607"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8607\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}