The buck flicks his tail and takes two steps. Here we go. He’s perfectly quartering away. Clench that release and bring the bowstring back. When that cam turns over, it’s downhill from there.
The draw’s back wall is rock solid. It’s time to bare down and relax your grip hand. Wiggle those grip fingers just a tad. You don’t want to torque the shot.
One-one-thousand. Lock that top pin on the crease of his shoulder.
Two-one-thousand. Hold it still.
Three-one-thousand. Exhale.
WHAP! The buck kicks then sprints wildly. He stops after about 50 yards and tumbles to the ground. All is again silent. Unleash those endorphins and feel the rush.
How many times have you played out this scene in real life? Dozens? A few? Once? Never, but have dreamed about the day when it finally happens? If you’ve answered yes to any of those, you should start by thanking the Missouri man who invented the compound bow 52 summers ago.
The Man Who Invented the Compound Bow
His name was Holless Wilbur Allen and, like most geniuses, he loved to tinker. Legend has at it that he once ripped apart his sister’s new and very expensive 35 mm German-made reflex camera just so he could try to put it back together. He succeeded.
Another story tells of how Allen, while traveling, heard the fish were biting in a nearby river. After rounding up a bare pole and some fishing line, he made an impromptu reel out of a hand-crank kitchen mixer and proceeded to catch his limit of white bass that afternoon.
It was that kind of ingenuity that prodded Allen to search for a better way to send arrows downrange. He was already an avid archer and whitetail bowhunter, but in the early 1960s that meant hunting with an old-fashioned recurve (or “bent stick” as they used to say). After reading up on kinetic energy in his son’s high school physics book, Allen got the idea to mount a small standard pulley to the notched ends of a homemade bow from which he cut off the recurved ends. The result was a bow that shot arrows faster than the traditional recurve and provided more kinetic energy. After a few modifications, he learned that oblong wheels (cams) were not only more efficient, they reduced the draw weight by a whopping 15 percent.
The Very First Compound Bow
It all seems so simple, but average archers back then must have viewed it as beyond radical. Allen filed for a patent on June 23, 1966. It wasn’t granted until three years later but by then the archery and bowhunting worlds were on notice. By the mid-1970s, there were more than 50 compound bow manufacturers, and by the late 1970s, more than two-thirds of all new bows sold in America were these new-fangled “compounds.” Allen had a lot of help along the way, including an important partnership with archery great Tom Jennings, who tweaked Allen’s design and added the idea of laminated limbs. Both men are members of the Archery Hall of Fame.
But any conversation of the idea for the compound bow as we know it today should begin with the name H.W. Allen. He never got rich off of it, and, in fact, died before many of his lawsuits against others were resolved.
There are many things that should make us bowhunters pause and be thankful every time we walk up on a fallen deer. Faith, family and creation are surely at the top of the list. Good health and great sustenance surely follow. However, somewhere in the credits we should also be fully aware of those who have gone before us and helped smooth the figurative trails.