Pierce 1902 Advertisement — Geo. F. Clark, A Study in Vibration and Kramer, National Champion

PIERCE CUSHION FRAME CHAINLESS

PIERCE CUSHION FRAME CHAINLESS.

BICYCLES

ARE NOW IN GOOD DEMAND

And we are showing the Largest Number of High and Medium Grades of any house in Worcester, and sell them for Cash or EASY TERMS OF PAYMENT

Below are a few of our Leading Wheels which are

GUARANTEED FOR THE SEASON OF 1902

THE “Cleveland”
THE “Tribune”
THE “Westfield”
THE “Bostonean”

A Study in Vibration

RIGID FRAME CUSHION FRAME

THE “Pierce”
THE “Eagle”
THE “Eldredge”
THE “Featherstone”

Ranging in PRICE from $20 to $75 and $85. Come in and see the “PIERCE” CHAINLESS, with Cushion frame, cushion forks and Hub Coaster Brake at $85 the best constructed Chainless Wheel in the World.

This is Kramer who won the National Championship on the Pierce Racer.

We have a Large Line of Sundries, and Tires of all makes at the Lowest Prices to be found in the city. WE INVITE YOUR INSPECTION.

WE DO REPAIRING. Tel. 923-4. Call Me Up.

GEO. F. CLARK,

660-MAIN STREET-660

FRANK L. KRAMER ON A PIERCE RACER. NATIONAL CHAMPION 1901

FRANK L. KRAMER ON A PIERCE RACER. NATIONAL CHAMPION 1901

[The advertisement is enclosed in an ornamental border of alternating rings and clover leaves. Two engraved machines head it, a woman’s at the left and a man’s at the right, each captioned PIERCE CUSHION FRAME CHAINLESS. At the center, inside a second border of the same pattern, is the comparative engraving titled A Study in Vibration: two riders side by side, the left on a machine labeled RIGID FRAME with the drawing blurred to suggest shaking, the right on one labeled CUSHION FRAME drawn sharp, its down tube lettered PIERCE. At the foot, flanking the shop’s name, two engravings of a racing man crouched over dropped bars, each carrying the Kramer caption.]

[One advertisement from page 19 of the Worcester Spy for Sunday 23 March 1902, cropped out of the newspaper page.

Geo. F. Clark sold eight marques and this sheet names them all, so the advertisement is not Pierce’s. The artwork is. Every engraving in it is a Pierce engraving — the two chainless machines at the head, the vibration study at the center and the two portraits at the foot — and the only model singled out with a price and a superlative is the Pierce Chainless at $85, the top of a range that starts at $20. A dealer who stocked Cleveland, Tribune, Westfield, Bostonean, Eagle, Eldredge and Featherstone alongside it chose to let Pierce carry the whole column.

Two things on this sheet matter beyond the shop that placed it.

The first is A Study in Vibration. The archive’s own Pierce Timeline records that advertisement under 1901, describing how it set the ride of the Hygienic Cushion Frame chainless against that of an ordinary machine. Until now that was a claim resting on secondary sources. This is a printed instance of it, in a newspaper of a known date, and it can be read: the argument is made entirely in a picture, one bicycle drawn blurred and one drawn sharp, with no supporting text at all. The rigid machine carries no marque. Only the cushion frame is lettered, and it is lettered PIERCE.

The second is Frank L. Kramer. Both foot engravings caption him as National Champion 1901, and the copy says plainly that he won the National Championship on the Pierce Racer. Kramer held the American professional sprint title from 1901 to 1916, and the Pierce Cycle Company brochure of about 1915 — the one this archive holds in transcription but not yet as a record — dates itself by describing him as champion “for fifteen years.” This advertisement is year one of that count, printed while it was happening. It shows the Pierce-Kramer association was already being used to sell bicycles in 1902, thirteen years before the brochure put his name on a model.

The price ladder is worth setting beside the 1898 Putnam & Sprague column also held here. In four years the entry point has fallen from $42 to $20 and the top of the range has risen from $100 to a chainless at $85. The boom has broken and the trade has split into cheap machines and a technical flagship.

The body text was set from the Library of Congress machine OCR and then read line by line against the image at native resolution, which is why this record is marked as machine text checked by eye. The machine text for this page is very poor — it renders every dollar sign as an 8 or an S, so that $20 to $75 and $85 arrives as S2O to 875 and 885 — and every figure above was read off the image. The Kramer captions were read at four times magnification.]