Angling: a collection of patents
An extraordinary collection of Angling patents being approximately 970 patents about 1769- 1951 excluding the trawling commercial and other non-angling patents in the original form as published by The British Government and their other printers..
About 16 years ago, Jamie Maxton Graham, published a book To Catch a fisherman, A century of Piscatorial inventions in which he revels in the works of the angling inventors through a set of the fishing abridgments which he acquired. This present collection is a step further for the collector these are the complete specifications, the whole lot, more or less.. including amongst others: Allcock about 50, Baker,12. Bartleet, 16. Farlow,12. Hardy,64 Millward, 16. Stanley, 7. Williams, 12 Young, 15 etc.. with patents on baits flies, floats fly cases , hooks, landing nets, lures and artificial baits, reels, rods, spinning tackle boxes tailers etc.
Here is from the preface of Grahams Book:
Introduction As every schoolboy knows, angling can be done with such simple equipment as cotton and a bent pin. At the other extreme, 1 know people who go out to the river with elegant old fly tackle worth a thousand pounds - and come home perfectly delighted with a brace of trout, value perhaps a couple of pounds. If you peer into that man's creel, you will find hundreds of intriguing devices for actually catching fish, and more for storing these devices. A tackle catalogue from a rich period like the 1920's would describe and illustrate thousands of piscatorial items, ranging from the irresistible to the ridiculous. Many such gadgets were the result of studious inven- tion and painstaking design by tackle firms and to keep the rights of the product to themselves it was vital to protect them by patent. Happily for us, the inventors had to lodge a written description, and full drawings, of the piscatorial aid. The principle was that enough information must be given for anyone to copy the invention - but then he wasn't allowed to. During the first 200 years of patent protection, no one was inventing much for anglers, and there were only 16 tackle patents before 1850. It was the International Fisheries Exhibition held in London in 1883 that really promoted new piscatorial thinking. The Mailoch Sun & Planet reel and the famous sidecaster both arrived in time for the Exhibition; the first ball-bearing reel, the fore-runner of the Hardy Perfect, came along in 1888 shortly followed by the first attempts at precision-made centrepin casting reels, the Aerial and the Silex While the professionals were making steady progress with increasingly ingenious reels, amateur inventors were, as always, busy trying to find easier ways of catching fish, and 1 have included some totally dotty ideas that could never have worked except on paper. Hardly a year passed without someone patenting an elaborate apparatus to strike a fish without extra effort on the angler's part, and there are two particularly fine examples of these impossible contraptions on pages 58 and 59 (of book). Of course, by the time all the levers had moved, the springs closed and hooks struck, any reasonably intelligent fish would have swum ten yards upstream to safety. Other glorious joke inventions include the charming self-angling kit the electrical fish stunner which makes it unnecessary to play a hooked fish, you just electrocute it, and the very humane but quite ineffective idea of putting your livebait inside a transparent cylinder.
The original patent abstracts were in pamphlet form and they covered trawling and commercial fishing as well as angling; this would have made the book twice the size and price, so 1 have cut out all the non-angling parts with the exception of the magnificent oyster-dredger (p 48) which, as any reader will agree, was completely irresistible. At least two famous names appear quietly among the list of inventors. Ettore Bugatti designed something other than the world's largest car: a huge, heavy, battery-operated sea reel.. And John Philip Sousa, famous for his military music and the oompahs of the Sousaphone, devised a most ingenious belt, perhaps forerunner of the fishing vest, with all sorts of gadgetry to help the fumble-fingered angler . As far as 1 know, neither of these inventions features in any tackle collection, and 1 suspect that they never reached the market. 1 found it easy enough to know where to start this book: in the 1850's, when the Patent Office started printing these brief abstracts. It was not so easy to know when to stop: there always seemed to. be yet another marvellous treasure overleaf. Eventually 1 came across the 1951 patent when Hardy's started to change their classic Duplicated Mark 11 fly reel cheek; The first version of the rather trendy cheek that Hardy's use on their fly reels today. Patent 687,539 introduced the death of the hand- made reel; it signalled the end of an era. It made a proper, but sad, finish to this book. Bu t, let us be more cheerful. Patent rights last for only 16 years: everything in this book is in the public domain. There are some marvellous ideas here which could still be used - and which perhaps can be more easily manufactured today with modern materials than they could fifty or a hundred years ago. In my daily work as a buyer and seller of old tackle, 1 notice an increasing number of requests for piscatorial bygones that people actually wish to use. Greenheart rods are coming back; the sturdy, utterly reliable prewar fly reels have never been so much wanted. Several customers are now using wet flies tied on tapered hooks to gut or nylon; black japanned fly boxes and cabinets are greatly pleasing to many who hate modern aluminium. A tackle shop owner tells me his best customers have always been those who march in and ask "What's new?". Perhaps we may be verging on another era when the question is "What's old?".
This collection is for sale
here are pages of a lot of pictures of angling patents including the Hardy Perfect
to get the earlier links here highlight url below and copy and put into address bar:
http://www.abebooks.com/pictures/TANVIS/fishingimage15jpg
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