The first U.S. patent granted for a fishing lure was to Julio T. Buel in 1852. The story goes that in the early 1820s Buel accidentally dropped a tablespoon overboard while fishing his home lake in Vermont, and as the spoon fluttered downward a lake trout grabbed it.

Being an avid fisherman, Buel immediately saw his future and started manufacturing spoons for local fishermen. In 1827 Buel moved to Whitehall, NY and opened a fur business, continuing to manufacture his Buel Trolling Spoons on the side. Demand grew so great that in 1848 he became a full time fishing lure manufacturer.

Today we call Buel’s original lures spoons. He also manufactured lures that revolved around a shaft, or an in-line spinner. Very popular were his arrowhead shaped spinners with feathered tail hooks, which are similar to the blades used on buzz baits today. Soon, many other manufacturers were producing spoons and in-line spinners (which were usually called spoonbaits at that time.)

In 1917 the W. J. (Bill) Jamison Co. of Chicago, IL started manufacturing the Shannon Twin Spin. This lure was nearly weedless with its twin overhead Indiana spinners on wire shafts. To my knowledge this was the first overhead “spinnerbait”. The lure became immensely popular. A testimony to the success of the Shannon Twin Spin was that nearly every tackle box found by lure collectors in the 1970s and 1980s contained several Twin Spins. They were so common that no one wanted to collect them, and they had little collector value.

In 1925 Jamison came out with a Shannon Single Spin, which was virtually identical to many of the spinnerbaits manufactured today. This overhead spinner was not as popular as the Twin Spin and is a bit harder for collectors to find.

The obvious difference between the Shannon baits and today’s spinnerbaits is the skirt material. The rubber skirt had not yet been developed by Fred Arbogast of Hawaiian Wiggler fame. And of course, vinyl skirts wouldn’t be available for over 75 years. Jamison used the most common hook dressings of the time, bucktail and feathers. There were limited colors available in the Shannon baits, with black, red & white, and all white seemingly the most popular.

The overhead spinnerbait market lay dormant after WWII, and then with the introduction of bass tournaments and the subsequent publicity of bass fishing, the market for “new” baits boomed. The overhead spinnerbait was reborn. Stan Sloan’s Zorro bait was probably the most publicized in the early 1970’s, but soon every lure manufacturer was in the spinnerbait business.

The next time you hear of a “new” spinnerbait, just remember its origins and the tremendous following these baits have had for almost 100 years – Nothin’s New.