Charles Minthorn Murphy
American racing cyclist, aviator
Charles Minthorn Murphy (October 1870 – February 16, 1950), also known as Mile-a-Minute Murphy, was an American cycling athlete. He was the first person ever to ride a bicycle for one mile in less than a minute. He performed this feat in 1899 by drafting behind a Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) passenger car along the LIRR's Central Branch between Farmingdale and Babylon on Long Island.
Biography
He was born in October 1870 to Eliza G. and Martin J. Murphy. On May 27, 1891, he married Elizabeth E. "Libbie" Puhl in Brooklyn. After the death of the latter in 1922, Murphy then married Catherine Kissel.
Mile-a-Minute ride
Murphy persuaded a railway company to board in two miles of track and run a train so he could ride a mile in a minute in its slipstream. It took him 57.8 seconds. He said in the Farmingdale Post that the idea came to him after an argument with friends at his home in Brooklyn, New York. "I was asked to give an opinion of the quality and relative speed of various prominent riders of the time", Murphy recalled.
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This entry incorporates text from “Charles Minthorn Murphy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.