South Bend Bait: one unpatented founder innovation over a shelf of bought paper

1901–1939 · WORDEN'S PROPELLERS, OLD'S PATENT, AND THE ASSIGNED-IN LURES

The pattern: The fishing-tackle firm the Businesses section carries — born as the Worden Bucktail Company in 1901, renamed for this city — is this section's cleanest exhibit of the rule that a patent number or it did not happen, because its record runs in both directions at once. The founder's own innovation stands first, and it has no number: Frank G. Worden is credited, in the National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame's account carried in The History Museum's compiled company history, with the fore-and-aft propeller arrangement on wooden lures — spinners at both ends of the bait — an innovation the museum's history notes other manufacturers had adopted by 1907. No letters patent in Worden's name was located in the record reached for this section, and his propellers are printed as what they are: a documented, hall-of-fame-credited innovation without a reachable patent behind it.

The company's most famous lure was not its own invention at all. The Bass-Oreno began as the patented lure of James Olds of Benton Harbor, Michigan, whose rights the South Bend company acquired in 1916 — the acquirer named as Ivar Hennings, who had bought out his partners in 1915, in the museum's full compiled history; this history's Businesses section names Kuntz in the same transaction, and the variance is stated here rather than smoothed, the museum's detailed account carrying the fuller record.

The patented line that followed runs through the firm's own officers and through paper assigned in from outside: F. Austin Cass received the patent for the Pike-Oreno and stood as the company's vice-president by 1921; the Peach-Oreno was patented in 1939, the year after the luminous OBITE lures were introduced, on the museum history's account, with those numbers likewise unpinned. The assigned-in file shows the system at work in a document this section can cite whole: Letters Patent No. 1,833,581, a fishing lure granted 24 November 1931 to William M. Jordan of Birmingham, Alabama, assignor to the South Bend Bait Company of South Bend — twenty-three claims to a jointed, snake-action bait — and reissued as Reissue No. 19,671 on 20 August 1935. A further lure patent assigned to the company, No. 2,017,333, covers a bait arranged to carry live bait.

And the boundary the museum's history itself draws belongs in the text: through most of the company's life its reels were manufactured for it by Shakespeare of Kalamazoo, so the reel side of the tackle record is Kalamazoo's making, not South Bend's. Summed at its true weight, the Bait Company's inventive record is a founder's unpatented improvement, a flagship bought in from across the state line, an officer's patented lure, and outside inventors' paper assigned to a South Bend name — which is to say, the ordinary honest shape of an American tackle firm, printed without inflation.

Sources:

1. The History Museum, compiled history of the South Bend Bait Company (in the South Bend Fishing Reel Schematics volume, read first-hand) — Worden's fore-and-aft propellers and the National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame credit; the 1916 acquisition of the Olds rights by Ivar Hennings; Cass's Pike-Oreno patent and 1921 vice-presidency; the Peach-Oreno patented 1939; OBITE 1938; Shakespeare of Kalamazoo as the reel manufacturer.
2. U.S. Patent No. 1,833,581 (24 November 1931) and its Reissue No. 19,671 (20 August 1935) — the documents themselves, via Google Patents and the Patent Office images: William M. Jordan of Birmingham, Alabama, assignor to the South Bend Bait Company, South Bend, Indiana.
3. U.S. Patent No. 2,017,333 — a fish lure assigned to the South Bend Bait Company, via the patent indexes.
4. The Businesses section of this history (banked) — the firm's founding and course, and its naming of Kuntz in the 1916 Olds transaction, the variance with the museum's Hennings account stated in the text.
5. Negative search, stated in the text: no letters patent in Frank G. Worden's name was located in the record reached for this section.