FISHING LURE
How inventors imitate the movements of a fish’s prey.
IN THE EARLY 1960s, word spread of a fishing lure with seemingly mystical powers. In the lake country of Finland, an artisan named Lauri Rapala had handcrafted artificial minnows out of balsa wood that zipped around with realistic movements. A US magazine described the product to its readers as ‘a lure fish can’t pass up’. Desperate to obtain the lures, US anglers hunted for a way to
buy them, usually with no luck. Imports were few, and bait shops often required a $20 deposit (about $160 in today’s dollars) to rent a Rapala lure for the day.
Inspired by the craze, George Perrin decided to create his own version out of plastic. Perrin, who owned Pradco, a company in Arkansas that manufactured crisper drawers for refrigerators, soon discovered that it took a lot of research and development to make plastic behave like a fish. To test prototypes, Perrin stood on the diving board of a friend’s swimming pool and cast his rod, adding or subtracting metal balls – called ‘rattles’ – inside the minnow so that it would float just under the sur-
face of the water. And when the angler twitched the line, the lure would dart around in a flash of silver.
People searching for the Finnish lure soon discovered Perrin’s invention, called the Rebel F10 Minnow. In 1963, the year after Perrin had started production, his company, Rebel Lures, sold half a million of them. (Rapala, meanwhile, built a factory to meet the demand, and its lure became widely available in the US by the late 1960s.) Lawrence Taylor, a spokesman for Rebel Lures, said an old-timer at the company joked that at the height of the minnow boom, “we made enough lures to outfit every man, woman and child in the country.’’