In 1896 for publicity, Metz had built the longest bicycle in the world—a special ten-seater, puckishly dubbed Oriten.85 (It’s on display today at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.) Orient racing models weighed only twenty pounds, but the Oriten tipped the scales at 305 pounds.86 Twenty-three feet and nine inches long,87 the length of four bicycles, it boasted a carrying capacity of 2,500 pounds—the weight of two full-sized horses. Metz and nine employees had set a world record for the mile on the board track in Charles River Park: 2 minutes 12 seconds.88 His Oriten, however, was so long that its front wheel carved deep into a turn while the rear remained on the straight. That forced the ten-seater wide around turns on standard velodromes—a disadvantage against shorter triplets or quads hugging the inside. Metz had taken human-powered pacing to its natural limit.
American posters were staid compared with what was popular in Paris, yet Edward Penfield had a flair for depicting a rider on Orient Cycles with poise decades before it was called cool. Image courtesy of Poster Photo Archives, Posters Please, Inc., New York.
Charles Herman Metz, at the front of his ten-seat Orient, took human pace to its limit. He imported small French motors to put on tandems then brought Champion from Paris for motorpace races. Used by permission of the Waltham Museum, Waltham, MA.
Then Metz read in the trade press about De Dion-Bouton engines on Clément tricycles and tandems. He wrote to Count Mechanic and secured North American rights to import his engines.89 In 1898 Metz had fitted them on Orient tandems and tricycles. The metronome put-put, the smell of gasoline, and the sensation of cruising 25 mph without any physical exertion prompted him to order Waltham’s dirt oval track surfaced with concrete—for less rolling resistance and more speed.
Other business chiefs fascinated with motor transportation were General Electric Company president Charles A. Coffin, in neighboring Lynn, and Lynn Gas and Electric Company president M. P. Clough. General Electric, the product of a recent merger of utilities, had headquarters in Schenectady, New York, although Coffin remained in Lynn. General Electric powered Boston’s metropolitan trolley system. Coffin and Clough had deemed that automobiles with electric motors trumped gas-combustion engines. Electric vehicles ran on lead-acid batteries, one of the nineteenth century’s technical triumphs, and they could be recharged at home (like plug-in hybrid electric vehicles today) or in charging stations, which, they foresaw, could be built around the country.
New electric autos, some manufactured by Pope from capital flowing from his Columbia Bicycle Company, allowed the driver to start them by pushing a button on the dashboard. That made for a convenient selling point over gas-combustion engines, which required that the driver go to the front of the vehicle, insert a hand crank, and turn it over to engage the engine, which required muscle. Steam-powered cars needed up to twenty minutes for water to heat up and make steam before they could be driven. Coffin and Clough ordered their companies to buy stock in Metz’s business and encouraged him to make electric-powered tricycles and autos.90
Gas-powered engines aroused suspicions at the Boston Globe, which disparaged motor-tandems as “devil catchers.”91 After Champion’s Paris-Roubaix victory, two events impelled Metz to take unprecedented action.
The first event occurred on June 30. Charles M. Murphy of Brooklyn, New York, pedaled on a special board surface laid between rails and paced behind a train car pulled by a locomotive on Long Island, near Hampstead Plains. Murphy, in cycling tights as the wind ruffled the hair on his bare head, had astounded Metz, and the world, by riding a mile in 57-4/5 seconds—the first person ever, on two wheels or four, to cover a mile in less than a minute.92 Murphy had proved that with a locomotive providing protection from air resistance a cyclist could pedal in the protected sweet spot and keep up, even at speeds topping 60 mph. Witnessing his feat were fifty New York journalists aboard the pace car. They filed dispatches published in newspapers across America and worldwide.
Press attention ignited discussions about changing prevailing technological assumptions. “Lesson of Murphy’s Ride: May Prove Means of Saving Millions in Transportation,”93 decreed Cycle Age and Trade Review. The editors called for designing wedge-shaped locomotives: “It is strange that with all of our earnest effort to reduce fuel expenses and increase the hauling power of our locomotives by improving the track, compounding the cylinders, enlarging the boiler and so on, we have not taken one of the obvious and simple precautions by which the greatest of all train resistances might be overcome.”
The second event happened in mid-August at the weeklong world cycling championships in Montreal. Organizers had held a twenty-mile exhibition race with five autos on the track in Queen’s Park. The Montreal Daily Star noted: “Automobiles are somewhat of a novelty just at present, but in a hundred years from now they will be part of everybody’s household economy, or at least so it is said.” Johnny Nelson, a diminutive Swedish immigrant from Chicago, put in a performance that indicated autos were coming much sooner. He followed an Orient motor-tandem around the track and thrilled twelve thousand spectators in the 100-kilometer (62.5 miles) amateur paced race. He hit a steady 31 mph—exceeding Montreal’s speed limit of 10 mph. He caused a sensation by lapping rivals on human-powered tandems and smashing world records every mile.94 A throng of jubilant fans carried him on their shoulders around the track.95 In the professional event, the winner paced by a regular tandem took ten minutes longer—time enough for Nelson to have gone five more miles.
Metz’s lesson from Montreal was that the approaching century would open the way to dramatic changes. The United States in 1899 had a population of 75 million.96 Among them, they owned 10 million bicycles.97 The market had reached saturation with oversupply that set off frantic price competition. In an attempt to control supply of products and limit a price war, the American Bicycle Company, 98 a holding company directed by Pope, was established to merge seventy-five brands.
Around Massachusetts prototype horseless carriages, built with a tiller that the driver held like reins to steer, began venturing onto roads. The Stanley twins in Watertown produced steam-powered Stanley Steamers.99 Charles Duryea downstate in Springfield drove gas-combustion vehicles he made with an obsolete socket on the dashboard for buggy whips to appease traditionalists.100 Pope offered electric cars,101 which he favored for running silently and without spewing out black smoke from burning oil. Few motor enthusiasts and tinkerers dared to take to the streets dominated by horses. For every automobile running on steam, gasoline, or electricity there were 3,600 horses and mules. Motor carriages powered by gasoline were noisy before mufflers were introduced, and they reeked of gas and oil. Steam-powered autos hissed. They spooked horses and caused disasters when animals ran out of control. Ransom Olds in Lansing, Michigan, affixed a replica horse’s head on the front of his early gas-combustion Oldsmobiles in an effort to prevent frightening the real equines.102
Metz’s friends and customers who earlier had rhapsodized about the joys of cycling now raved about driving autos and other diversions, such as photography and golf. The United States was undergoing a cultural makeover. People in greater numbers were moving from the countryside to jobs in cities. With increased social and economic mobility, a new middle class was emerging. Just as bicycles had usurped business from horse-drawn carriages in the 1880s and 1890s, it appeared to Metz that autos would do the same to bicycles. Then Metz received a large injection of cash from General Electric and the Lynn Gas and Electric Company buying stock in his Waltham Manufacturing Company to encourage Metz to expand his company.103 He invested the extra money to hire Champion.104 As if on cue, HMS Majestic docked in New York and Champion walked down the gangway.
When Champion first met Metz, he saw a thin man of thirty-five, his size, who appeared capable of challenging him in a race. Metz trimmed his mustache precisely. Like Marks, he wore a bowler. Champion, clean-shaven, favored the flat wool hats of his proletariat class, also popular with American boys waving newspapers for sale on street corners. C
hampion had grown up with his family and Elise calling him Albert when, to everyone else, he went by Champion. Warburton and Marks had shortened his first name, in the British manner, to Bert, sometimes rounded out to Bertie. Charles Herman Metz called him Al. Metz asked Al Champion to call him by his initials: C. H.105 So it was that Al and C. H. shook hands.
Metz had hired the Frenchman to race for him and to aid in his plan to shift from manufacturing bicycles to manufacturing autos. He also planned to prevail on Champion’s experience with De Dion-Bouton engines as part of his effort to narrow France’s lead in engine technology. One of their first conversation topics on the train ride from New York to Boston revolved around crafting a gas-combustion engine small enough to fit on a bicycle: voilà, the motorcycle, still awaiting development in America.
Champion and Marks moved into a boarding house that Metz had booked for them, a triple-decker Victorian with bay windows on a tree-lined street in Cambridge. Champion’s new digs at 19 Cottage Street were near the outdoor Charles River Park with its outdoor board track, and they were a short bicycle commute to Metz’s factory along the Charles.106 Assertive about promoting both his business and Al Champion, C. H. had committed his newcomer to a twenty-five mile paced match race in three weeks behind motor-tricycles in New York’s palace of play, Madison Square Garden.
C. H. showed Al and Dudley around his factory, a wooden building on Rumford Avenue.107 He introduced them to general manager John C. Robbins, a disciple of Metz since their youth in Utica, in upstate New York.108 Utica cycling pals had included Charles Stewart Mott, a second-generation wheel and axle maker and future General Motors director. Robbins, a self-taught engineer, at twenty-eight, directed some 150 skilled machinists,109 mechanics, craftsmen, and laborers. They took pride in calling themselves the Men of Metz.
Metz came to own his company through an eclectic route consistent with many ambitious men of his generation. His father had immigrated, from Germany at fifteen and apprenticed as a carpenter in Utica.110 Young Metz had quit school after the sixth grade to apprentice to his father.111 He had an avid sense of curiosity and bought a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica.112 By the time he had read all the volumes from A to Z, studying famous people and the wonders of mechanical power transforming the nineteenth century, he had learned how to work with tools, build houses, and manage a business. His eclectic education made him restless. He left carpentry to operate a men’s clothing shop, followed by a stint as clerk in an insurance company until he was about twenty, in 1883, and discovered high-wheel bicycles.113 He enjoyed cycling and had no trouble landing a job as a sales rep in Utica for Pope’s Columbia Bicycles.114 In 1885 Metz won the New York State one-mile championship.115 He made his own bicycle accessories. By 1889 he had moved to Boston for a job as a designer for a bicycle company.116 He married Elizabeth Humphrey and the two had a son.
Following the arrival of the chain-drive on a diamond frame from England, Metz founded his company with two financial backers.117 He bought land in Waltham on the Charles River. Waltham was home to skilled workers in iron and brass foundries, textile factories, and paper mills. Waltham had a history of advances. Early in the 1800s, a Waltham company had produced sulfuric acid, essential for making iron and steel in vast quantities.118 Dentist Dr. Francis F. Field had invented the process for making chalk crayons, and he had founded the American Crayon Company.119 The Waltham Watch Company had innovated mass production, relying on interchangeable parts to make jeweled pocket watches.120 In 1855 Waltham’s Tar Factory produced the first clear white Kerosene from coal oil, replacing whale oil for lighting and heating.121 After the Panic of 1893, brought on by railroads overbuilding with dubious funding, fifteen thousand companies failed, five hundred banks folded, and the economy cartwheeled into depression.122 One of the few bright spots was the bicycle industry. In October 1893 Metz and partners incorporated the Waltham Manufacturing Company with $100,000 capital to make Orient bicycles, with Metz as president.123
During the progressive 1890s, men and women on bicycles filled urban parks on summer evenings and cycled on weekends to explore the countryside for fitness and sightseeing. Cycling had become America’s first coast-to-coast craze. Poems and songs were composed to celebrate cycling, such as “Bicycle Built for Two.” Racing rivaled baseball and horseracing as America’s most popular spectator sports. Most cities supported at least one velodrome. Racers dominated as America’s best-paid athletes. National champion Tom Cooper, who would fund Henry Ford in 1903, earned more than $15,000 a year,124 while major league baseball team owners tethered greats like Honus Wagner, the Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop commemorated today as the subject of the most valuable baseball card in existence, to contracts of around $5,000 per year.125 Basketball had only started to catch on in Northeast colleges. Football moldered as a raffish underworld diversion. Boxing had a red-light-district reputation and was outlawed in many states.
In 1897 Metz’s company produced fifteen thousand Orient bicycles, tandems, and tricycles.126 (In 2014 that would amount to operating revenue of about $40 million.) He kept making innovations and received twenty-two patents, including one for a sturdy fork crown holding the front wheel to the frame, a design still in use worldwide. He promoted Orients with famous riders, including the Columbia University cycling team, and advertised their victories. At the 1899 Montreal world championships, Marshall “Major” Taylor of Indianapolis, the first African-American to leap over the color line in pro sports, made history by winning the world professional sprint championship on an Orient. C. H. hired Al Champion to help his company shift to motor vehicles.
THE SHADOW OF DEATH, WHICH MANY FOLLOWERS OF CYCLE RACING HAVE MAINTAINED HOVERED OVER THE HEADS OF MOTOR CYCLISTS, AT WALTHAM YESTERDAY BECAME A REALITY.
—JOHN J. DONOVAN, BOSTON GLOBE, MAY 31, 19001
Bostonians were cycling crazy. Even after autumn freezes, punctuated by bucketing rains and wind gusts, had stripped trees bare and made everyone seek refuge indoors, Boston offered what Champion needed. He rode on the board velodrome of the Park Square Coliseum,2 which was housed inside a wooden building owned by the Boston and Providence Railroad at Park Square and Boylston Street. Boston’s dynamic, big-city controlled chaos made him feel comfortable. Paris operated as the head for the body of France—its national capital, heart of banking, focal point of fashion, and, at the time, the epicenter of France’s bicycle and auto milieus. Champion discovered that Boston served much the same function as the Bay State capital, business hub for Massachusetts and the five surrounding New England states, which together were comparable in size to France. And Boston was the center for bicycle and auto enterprises.
The coliseum offered a shabby but genteel version of the Vel d’Hiv while functioning as the center for cyclists compulsive about keeping their edge. Sunday afternoon programs attracted decent attendance and offered prize money. Champion joined an army of amateurs and pros from around the United States, Canada, Europe, even Australia.
When he was not training, Champion was assigned by Metz the task of fitting the latest De Dion-Bouton engines he had brought from France onto Orient tricycles for his twenty-five-mile paced match race in Madison Square Garden. Champion was to compete against another Orient pro, Harry Elkes of Glens Falls, New York, America’s first national paced champion, for Champion’s introduction to America.
Champion easily spotted Elkes, a six-footer—unusual among pro cyclists and exceptional for one who specialized in pacing. His ears stuck out like jug handles under dark hair parted on the left side rather than down the center, which was in vogue. Toothpick arms, shoulders narrow as a greyhound’s, and long scissor-like legs added up to his nickname “Lanky.” He was known for his calm disposition, which vanished when he raced aggressively and screwed his face into a grimace, what the press termed a “bicycle face.”3 In 1898 he had turned twenty and shot into national prominence by breaking one national record after another while becoming America’s inaugural national pacing champion, entitled to wearing
the stars and stripes around his waist in competitions.4 The next year in Philadelphia, Lanky Elkes set a new world hour record of 36.7 miles,5 pedaling behind a relay of four Orient motor-tandems. He had broken the record of Champion’s rival Edouard Taylor, set months earlier in Paris, by a full mile.
As soon as Champion and Elkes met, they became friends. The American pleaded for Champion’s help to race in Paris. Both men were the same age—Elkes just four months younger—and Champion obliged by contacting Clément and Pierre Tournier, who arranged contracts in Paris. Clément served as president of the French Board of Trade and Automobile Makers and was happy to have an American national champion racing on his Gladiator Cycles.6
In the weeks before he shipped out, Elkes followed motor-tandems steered by Frank Gately, a sardonic man in his mid-twenties. Gately preferred driving the motors and gave up racing bicycles. He appreciated the better pay—earning at least ten percent of Elkes’s winnings. Gately’s duties involved keeping the engine in top running condition. Elkes endured enough falls and injuries to half-joke that he was saving his prize money to attend college and become a doctor.7 He often praised Gately for steering through traffic congestion in motor-tandem paced events, extolling Gately’s nerves of iron, sound judgment, and sense of tactics. He called him “King” Gately.
Champion trained in the coliseum behind Marks on a motor-tricycle. Elkes worked out following King Gately. Reporters from the eight dailies on Newspaper Row, downtown on Washington Street,8 reported on the Sunday international races. To sharpen his skills, Champion competed in different events. His limited English curbed rapport with journalists unless Marks showed up and translated. Champion resumed pedaling the unicycle around the flat inside perimeter, which would remind him of Paris and Warburton and their days together. He took advantage of riding without hands on the handlebars to wave to spectators in the stands. The unicycle captivated the Globe’s John J. Donovan. He described Champion as “famous as one of the best Continentals on a unicycle—a single-wheel contraption which required the skill and dexterity of a tightrope walker to manipulate.”9
The Fast Times of Albert Champion Page 11