Pierce 1916 Advertisement — DeSanders Cycle Supply Co., Bicycle and Motorcycle Headquarters

BICYCLE AND MOTORCYCLE HEADQUARTERS

One Million Bicycles for 1916 1-2 of these will be

PIERCE ARROW’S

PIERCE BICYCLES

If you are not riding a Pierce Bicycle we are both losers. If you are figuring on a bicycle, we cordially invite you to call in and inspect our high grade, durable made Pierce bicycles.

Guaranteed For Ever

The Famous Excelsior

The Leading American Motorcycle

The fastest and most durable in the world. Holder of the American National Championship. The machine that made 300 miles in three hours and twenty-nine minutes, at Chicago September 15, 1915. Come in and let us demonstrate this fine machine.

TO OUR PATRONS

Free air for your bicycles. It will not blow out your tire. Everything to accomadate the bicycle trade. Ask our customers. They are all pleased with the fine line of tires and accessories. We have the best and most complete bicycle stock in the valley. Best repairing, prompt work. Everything Strickly Guaranteed.

We Have Some Bargains In Second Hand Bicycles

DeSanders Cycle Supply Co.

54 West 1st North Phone 201

“SPALDING SPORTING GOODS”

[The advertisement is enclosed in a heavy rounded frame. Below the headline the space is divided into three ruled panels, the center one carrying a large engraving of a V-twin motorcycle. Across the foot, two smaller engravings of the same machine flank the shop’s name.]

[One advertisement from page 8 of the Logan Republican, Logan, Utah, for Tuesday 29 February 1916, cropped out of the newspaper page. The page it came from is given over entirely to the bicycle trade — four dealers, one to a block.

This is the latest Pierce material in the archive and the strangest, because of its headline. The dealer advertises the bicycles as PIERCE ARROW’S. They were never called that. The archive’s own Pierce Timeline states the point under 1908: after the corporate split the bicycles continued as products of the Pierce Cycle Company and were never Pierce-Arrow bicycles, the misnomer probably owed to the arrow-shaped head badge on early machines. That has been the site’s position, argued from secondary sources. Here is the misnomer itself, in print, in a dealer’s own headline, eight years after the split and two thousand miles from Buffalo. It is evidence for the claim rather than against it: this is precisely how the confusion spread, a shopkeeper in Utah borrowing the motor car’s fame to sell a bicycle.

The claim beside it should be read as trade puffery and not as a figure. One million bicycles for 1916 is roughly the right order for total American production; half of them being Pierces is not credible by any measure, and Pierce was never a volume maker on that scale.

The advertisement is kept whole rather than cut down to its Pierce column, because the advertisement is the unit and cutting it would be editing the source. That leaves a motorcycle of another marque at its center. The Excelsior copy is transcribed above with the rest. Its record checks out arithmetically — 300 miles in three hours and twenty-nine minutes is an average near 86 miles an hour, a board-speedway figure rather than a road one. The middle digit of 300 is a zero whose left side failed to ink, and it was read at five times magnification against the two sound zeros around it before being set down.

Two misspellings are the sheet’s own and are transcribed as printed: “accomadate” in the patrons panel and “Strickly Guaranteed” at its foot.

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 rather than as transcription. The machine text for this page is very poor, the three panels arriving interleaved line by line, and the whole of it was reset from the image.]