(SCIENCE ENGINEERING) Correspondence of Canadian motorboat

Sale 2600 - Lot 219

Price Realized: $ 375

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 500 - $ 750

(SCIENCE & ENGINEERING.) Correspondence of Canadian motorboat innovator W. Albert Hickman. 45 letters addressed to Hickman in Pictou, Nova Scotia from a variety of correspondents; minimal to minor wear. Various places, 1900-1912

Set Alert for Similar Items

Additional Details

William Albert Hickman (1878-1957) was a maritime engineer best known for the Hickman Sea Sled and other high-performance motorboats. Most of these letters are from suppliers, contractors, customers, and journalists in the boating world, many relating to his Viper series of boats. Correspondents include E.W. Johnston, editor of Canadian Motor Boat; the Ferro Machine & Foundry Company of Cleveland, OH; and Walter M. Billing, editor of The Rudder in New York, who illustrated one letter with a drawing of an 1877 riverboat (illustrated). Hickman boasts about his boat's performance at a Canada-wide exhibition in an 18 October 1910 letter to his engine supplier: "It was not a race, any more than any Viper race ever has been. It was a feverish holocaust. . . . Boat for boat, we licked her by 2 min. 7 sec., and the Essex by nearly 5 minutes. There is not a motor boat man in Eastern Canada who doesn't know what engine is in Viper."