By Gerry Swanson
I was putting in for a deer tag in Montana, during the bow season. It got me thinking of my first bow, a Bear Archery Alaskan 6 wheel model. It featured dual needle bearings, micro click adjustment and the hot C4 eccentric wheels that are about 1 3/4 inches in diameter. It was heavy and needless to say I didn’t kill much with it. But I swallowed the bow hunting bug hook, line and sinker.
It’s all thanks to an obscure Missouri innovator named Holless Wilbur Allen. In the early 1960s, Allen was fiddling with the first compound bow, hoping to give the bows of the future a mechanical advantage over traditional bows.
At first, Allen tried sawing the ends off the limbs of a recurve bow attaching pulleys, which created a crude block and tackle system. This system didn’t work well, however, as the bow had a limited draw length due to the short limb tip travel. After four years of tinkering and who knows how many design changes, Allen settled on a system of cams and eccentric wheels in place of the original pulley system.
Allen filed for a patent in June 1966, and in December 1969 patent No. 3,486,495 was issued.
Allen also approached several manufacturers about building and marketing his new bow, but found no one willing to accept the challenge. So, he began marketing the Allen Compound Bow in 1967.
This first compound bow was not quickly accepted by the industry or the public, and sales were modest at best. It might have staggered along quietly, then died a slow death.
Enter Tom Jennings.
In the late 1960s, Jennings was technical editor for the old Archery world magazine, today known as Bowhunting World. Allen had sent Tom an early prototype of his compound bow to play with and report on. Jennings published his review in the magazine’s May 1967 issue, giving it high marks. He said things like “reduction in peak draw weight, “more stable than recurves”and the first really new concept to come into bow design in a thousand years.
He quickly applied for, and was granted, Allen’s first license, then began building and marketing his own version of the compound bow. Archery and bowhunting, would never be the same.
By today’s standards, the first compound bows were heavy, clunky and expensive. However, they generally shot their arrows, faster, with a flatter trajectory and more consistent accuracy than any other bows around.
Compound bows had another advantage not readily apparent to shooters. Being made from separate parts, they could be tinkered with and improved more easily than carefully crafted traditional bows.
In 1972, only two companies Carroll Archery Products and Olympus, were marketing compound bows. By 1974, eight companies were selling them to an expanding market.
It was this year Jennings Revolutionized the revolution, with the introduction of his legendary Model-T, a two wheel compound with tip to tip cable harnessing. The Jennings Model-T was lighter and much easier to tune, making it easier for the serious bow hunter. Sales shot through the roof.
By the late 1970s, several archery companies, including PSE Bear, Darton, Martin archery, Browning, Ben Pearson and Hoyt, were challenging Allen and Jennings for the compound bow market. By 1976 all states except Georgia legalized their use during bowhunting season.
About this time Pope & Young Club began accepting entries of animals taken with compounds.
In 1977 Archer’s Digest listed over 100 different models of compound bows, compared to just 50 different versions of the recurve. By the time Allen’s 17 year patent expired in the mid 1980s a truck load of bow companies had tried their hand at building and marketing archery’s future star.
Sadly, Allen died in a 1979 car accident, not living long enough to see how his compound bow would change the face of bowhunting forever.
Modern compounds have continued to evolve, both in bow design like my Matthew’s no cam bow, and accessories like arrow rests, how they’re shot such release aid and string loop, and the arrows they launch.
We owe it all to a man who loved to hunt and fish and whose love of machines and desire to know how they worked set the stage for the modern bowhunting revolution. Holless Wilbur Allen. Thank you, sir for making the great outdoors fun!
