The Fishing Reel Patent Archive

The American fishing reel was born in watchmakers' shops in Kentucky, which explains a great deal about it. When George Snyder and then the Meek brothers of Frankfort began building multiplying casting reels — the spool spinning several turns for each turn of the crank, running in jeweled bearings — they were doing horology that happened to smell like river. Their descendants are collected like watches too, which is fitting.

This site holds the patent record of that lineage and everything around it: multiplier gearing and its critics; click mechanisms and drags; Charles Orvis's 1874 fly reel with its perforated spool, light and ventilated and instantly right; the Brooklyn shop of Julius vom Hofe stamping patent dates into back plates; and the great obsession of the early twentieth century, the anti-backlash device — a whole literature of governors, brakes, and thumbing substitutes patented against the bird's nest of overrun line.

Reel collecting runs on maker stamps and the patent dates on feet and plates, and those dates are exactly how this archive is arranged. The date on the reel finds the patent; the patent page gives you the original drawing at full size, the claim in plain English, what the mechanism was actually trying to do, and our honest view of whether it did.

The drawings are U.S. government engravings and belong to everyone — public domain from the day of issue. Set the drag light and browse.