Fred Bear: The History of the Bow and Arrow | Bear Archery

[Music] it's not generally known just when Bozeman Archer was intended D they're made out of wood with bows and arrows and they're not durable like other artifacts it can be dug up and aged but the best guess that we've been able to come up with this some 50,000 years ago how they were invented their hula venom we don't know but we think maybe the little ball a little bent stick with the string art that was used to spin the little drill to make fire might have given the idea to somebody maybe it may even be that the little drill thing got misused and that the arrow the bow shot the arrow and a little drill out of it and the idea came that way it seems logical that that might have been the way it was done Chinese made a bowl I'm not suggesting in Chinese invented but they made a bowl with the handle and they still make him that way then he only makes ammonia bowls nowadays but the the handle was about a third of the way up from the center from the bottom of the ball from the lorry end of the bull and our best guess on that is that the first bull was the maybe a sprout from a tree or a stump and they put a string on it and because it was thicker and heavier at the bottom they had to hold it lower and that may have suggested that longbows had to be built that way because they still do it but only I think for ceremonial effects they use at least the modern archers use the kind of equipment we use not the first balls and the bows English use made history with them was were made are you and there look very much like this they were narrow they were flat in the back the you would that they used and this is a you would go it's very springy material and I think he mostly from Spain didn't have any or very little you in England but this wood was available to him and the milk boys were made and they were crowned in the on the compression side on the inside and I don't know why it took us so long but so many just fifty years ago that we discovered if that section were flat and the limb were wider the boys would be much more durable they wouldn't be brakes often because the stresses would be spread evenly and actually the there were no change in the boat design over all those years until about five hundred years ago that Turks came up with the idea of a composite Bowl and this you may not seem like a bulb but it is it's built over a form backwards the the center there's a course section in there same as that are in course section and all the bows that made that they the bank is Cinna from animals heel or loin tendons from animals that's dried and they're glued on there on this wood centerpiece and the compression I should this the cinemas on this side because the boat pulls around this way it spreads around and pulls this the opposite direction the cinemas on this side here the backside and then the core and on the compression side is the Horn of the Asiatic Buffalo and this bow shoots an arrow much much faster and matter of fact even with our modern technology we have only just recently just in the last few years exceeded the flight distances that they that the Turks shot an arrow they shot arrows over nine hundred yards and it's take this a long time to catch up with him but we we've exceeded that distance now but that was quite an advantage in a battle yeah if you could shoot an arrow father and the battles many of them were fought with clouds of arrows if you could shoot her to reach her enemy before he is equipment before you're in range with his equipment there's quite an advantage and the Turks did a great job with this bow except they had to pick there the days they're gonna fight because they didn't have any waterproof glue and if it got to wet down they were out of business and the war was over well from this stage the modern bull the straight Bowl like the English made out of us is now made usually a laminated wood and fiberglass it was a war born material and how it happened how we happened to use fiberglass in the bows a salesman for Corning Glass Company in Corning New York dropped into he was a an archer bow hunter dropped into our shop in Detroit in the very early 40s and he had a piece of fiberglass cloth and I had never seen or heard of it and it was very surprised that a glass would be flexible like it was in to be woven into cloth like this but I had not any great interest in it until he mentioned that was elastic he said that it was last statement was very strong and it would stretch or compress and unlike any other material would always return to its original position until it was overstressed it would break well at that interested me because if it was elastic maybe it's the material we needed for the back of her bulls and so I asked him if he'd send me some of the some of the cloth when he got back and he said he would what she did and we were at that time doing some work for Chrysler and we knew their head chemist there whose name was Don Swayze who had developed a mint or glue for bonding or gluing Robert the metal first time it ever was heard of and that was used to make rubber motormouth so the vibrations of the engine would not be transmitted to the frame and of course all motor mounts are made like that not well I took this class and he'd invented this this they called her the sake of world second world cement 55 over nine there's an emote I took this fiberglass cloth over the Don Swayze and said can you coat this with your psycho world cement and lay three or four to get layers together and dirt in the press cure that 325 degrees he said yeah sure so he made us from the first fiberglass Oh bull material we put it on cymbals and that we found out that it worked fine on the extension side it was a glass cloth of course worked fine that a beautiful job made the bow unbreakable but it was too strong for the one on the complaint on the compression side the belly side it wouldn't take it because it was a cloth and the little fibers being bent like that would kink and break so but it was a good backing material and but it was too strong and it kreisel the wood it did check the wood the wood wouldn't take the compression so then four am what is a great bag of material and for about a year we put aluminum on the face of it and here's here's a bowl with that aluminum on it the aluminum was stronger we cemented to it with the cycle well cement and it did a pretty good job but it stayed straight and took the did the job was supposed to do but in the meantime we got fiberglass thread or yarn and made wrapped it on a wheel and cured it while it was turning to get a unidirectional glass where we didn't have to use the cloth all the fibers were running in the same direction and we got that on the bowl we found that did the job so here's a bowl with the glass on the both sides and that's the way practically all of the bows have been made in the last thirty years and it did a great job because to the industry if you want a good bowl up until this time till fiberglass was available you had to seek out a fellow who probably had a workbench in his basement yeah and had a natural ability as a craftsman and an eye for beauty yet they get older him and Auntie if you want the real good bull and say hey how about making me a bowl well he said yeah I'll make you a bowl and maybe sometimes he would say well you want to pick out the billets we're talking about you bowl course we also did the same thing with Doce joins maybe you had some billets there and you can pick the billets out like you'd pick out the green for a gun stock and here to make your ball and maybe two or three weeks or months you might you will get it and was rather expensive and it its life was questionable because you never know when they're gonna break well and to get the you material there were people out in the West you came mostly from Oregon up in the high mountain see the best of you who came at the higher altitudes and there were people who would with a pack sack and a lunch kit maybe even a tent and walk around those mountains looking for a yew tree that had a long enough section in it to make a half a bull both of all the good bows were made in billets but only half the length there fishtail spliced in the middle they're very difficult to get a piece six feet long without flaws in it one of the problems was the you would has a berry on it and the Bears like the berries and when a climber a you tree to get the berries they usually tear them the sapwood up with their claws sliding down so that was one of the problems and the source of the wood was very questionable so finally when fiberglass came along you could work it with a micrometer he doesn't have to follow the grain and it took a couple pieces of maple and the glue had on the outside you had a bowl that you could put into production and for the first time in history we had a bowl that we could sell to the dealer at a discount so he could make a little money and he had it available to the to the consumer and it's really one of the things that caused caused the rapid growth in archery and boarding that we've gone through in the last 30 years the availability of good equipment at a reasonable price from sporting wood dealers the the glass bow is very durable much more durable anything we had in the past and as I said that's one of the reasons for the popularity of bow hunting today I'm not too long ago it was discovered well actually the Turks discovered it that if you curved the end of the bull limbs the bow would be smoother to draw it wouldn't tighten up so fast in the back end and it would shoot an arrow faster so we began to make bows and this is only in the only in the early thirties that this we began to make bows with a what do you call a reef curve and this is a nonworking recurve it's still and the way the way that happened the way that it pulls and increase gives you it gives them a better speed is because as you pull it back the bow becomes longer as a string leaves this recur section here the bullet becomes longer and that makes the weight pulling less at the back end of the draw not too long ago we began making the bowl like many of them are made today with a working recurve this has the maple core and the fiberglass on both sides and this does a better job of smoothing up the back end of the draw and gives you more speed to the arrow and that pretty much covers the blows of the day the conventional bows do today and the next step the biggest thing that's happened in archery and a great many years is a compound bow and that's the balls with the wheels of the ends and the cables the handle is usually magnesium could be wood the limbs are usually laminated like the conventional longbow but could also be solid fiberglass we have cams or eccentrics on the end here and what they do is on any of every other type of bow it gets heavier as you pull it back this bow it gets easier as you pull it back by as much as 50% so you can have a 50 pound bow that pulls 50 pounds up here and when you get back to full draw to the length of the arrow it drops off 225 pounds so it's quite an advantage because it's very easy to hold 25 pounds as against holding 50 pounds while you're aiming and so this boys the compound bow is taking over and about 9 out of 10 of bows that are sold and used today are made like this it's interesting to note that the fiberglass technology the actual ability of preparing the fiberglass yarn and to its job it's need to do in the bolt was developed by those of us here at bear archery quite a few years ago in the days of the conventional bull the stresses in the compound bow the bow with the wheels the cams are very high and without this technology without this already prepared and tested material we would not have the compound bow it is that we would not have any materials to stand up under the stresses that are developing with those of us to be real happy that we that a rather large part in this promotion in the heavy bows that are used for hunting which are usually 50 pounds or more the fact that the weight drops off and to maybe 50 percent or 30 or 40 percent and is easier to hold reminds me of a bow you bow that we made in the very early early days of our Archy business I had a Steve a beautiful you Steve full-length six-foot stay that art young had given me and Anna Boyer by the name of Nell scrum Li and we would occasionally take that stave and look at it and I was gonna sort of study it like you might look at a diamond that you're going to cut in this state was valuable because it was so beautiful and it had extra value because it was given to me Bart young so after a couple of years of fooling around and we finally got a bow made and the poor turned out to be 85 pounds weighty five pounds is a lot of bull and you when you wood is finished you had boys finishing and you put a string on it and wear it whatever that weight is if the bow is properly children nicely made that's the way it should stay at but eighty-five pounds was entirely too heavy and I first gave it to a friend of mine who lived up in West Branch he was a real husky woodsman an outdoorsman and he shot it for a while and then it wound up in the hands of a fella over in East Side of Michigan I forgot his name and he went hunting with went deer hunting with it one day and he saw a beautiful buck coming at an angle I'm gonna pass him real close and he was gonna get a good shot so he waited till a deer his head was behind the big tree and then he pulled this bull back well the deer stopped and he said I didn't know he said it was so heavy I couldn't hold it but he said I knew if I let it down I couldn't get it back again so I never did get through the rest of the story but he didn't get the deer and and that was one of the problems that we had with heavy bows that is eliminated by the use of the compound bow you're holding a much lighter weight and if a deer stopped his head behind the tree ignored weight again I'm referring to our early days in Detroit where my business began in 1933 the Belgians are quite a number of people from Belgium in Detroit at that time you're still are yes they in their own on their own in the old country I used to have popinjays shoots there was a big pole went way up in the air and had arms on it and I'm said little pointed spikes on it and they'd make a little bird out of a wooden clothespin they drill holes they wouldn't forget on there and they had a we put our little bird feathers on but make it look like a bird and you stood under the pole and shot straight up with an arrow that had a head on it about an inch in diameter the head was made out of he's yet a buffalo horn and that really was not so much an archery shooting match more of a drinking match because you got one shot if you do a number when you went when your registers you do a number and there might be 50 shoes maybe there's 100 shooters big tournament and when your number came up you've got out there and you shot an arrow and then you get turned again till everybody else has shot an arrow meantime there was usually a cake there and it was quite an affair well in Detroit we couldn't they had horizontal archery ranges popinjay is what was a cinema but that's what they call the birds a pop and Jade was a chamber and they shot horizontally in Detroit indoors and there was there was a range there I think the name it was a green tavern and they had this range downstairs and the upstairs was it was a bar and he also threw darts up there and was quite a deal well they're both made in Belgium were laminated bowls made of three different kind of woods and they were very long six and some of them seven feet and because it was so long and so hard to get around with in the car or streetcar they had them take apart it was a feral type thing like you take a fish right apart well now on a trip I made to Alaska with the conventional long bowl that I had to check as Baggies long as my other gear I took a flight nonstop Chicago to Anchorage and I got off the plane but my heart's equipment didn't and the stop in Anchorage was for fuel and my aunt was a fly in hunt and I'm being left-handed there were no other left-handers in the party and I found those moves pretty hard to kill with rocks so I determined that I would make a a ball that could be taken apart and put in a small enough piece to go under my seat and airplane the first attempt was this one here this is even before the fiberglass thing because that has a piece of vulcanized fiber on for the backing this is a laminated bowl like the Belgians use also with Hickory the light wood is is Hickory in this bowl and this face wood is Osage orange which is stronger than you and they harder wood it's also has the solid non-working recur well the bow I made this first design comes apart like that it's an iron hook that hooks into a piece of steel that's screwed and glued to the bow and that was alright that worked good except the only advantage was it was a tinker part and if half the bow broke well what do you do you have to make the whole thing over again and match it up with the other half that didn't work out so good so I finally decided that the handle of the bow the middle section of the bow being the major part of the bowl and where most of the work was that if made a handle and limbs that would slide into it and be fastened into it it'd be a pretty good deal and it would be in a real small container no problem getting it under the seat in real handy and then you could also change limbs you could have limbs for practice or limits for your wife or son or whatnot and limbs have different lengths you take him right out and put them in and this was the first model of that pole these these limbs came out were held in with this little thing like a shotgun just like taking the double-barrel shotgun apart you push the lever and two pieces come apart in your hands no screws bolts nothing and the tuchus bow to africa in 1964 and I shot a Asiatic Buffalo with it but this system this socket system was not right it was too expensive to make that was the main thing that was wrong with it so we can went back to the workbench and a couple years later we came up with the final design worthy you polish clip back and the limb comes right up the limb itself straddles a tongue or a groove in the panel there and it always goes back straight very easy to put together and no big problem and you can break it down into a case that's less than two feet long this is the bow that is the ultimate there are lots of limbs that you bolt in like in the compound bow and there's all kinds of takedown but this is a takedown everybody likes best and we still produce it this is my personal hunting ball I've been hunting with this bow since 1965 when we change from this kind of a experimental socket to this kind which is what we still have today I still shoot this ball this conventional bow a lot of people wonder why I don't shoot the compound bow well I taught myself to shoot and when you teach yourself sports sometimes without any instructions exactly how to do it you sometimes develop bad faults and I had a lot of and I've finally turned out to be a snap shooter and there are two kinds of snap shooters I want to warn you about this one of them is is when you're afflicted with a a problem a mental problem called freezing and it seems silly to say that there you had trouble when you suffer from this problem it seems silly to say that you cannot pull the ball all the way back and hold it while you're aiming and you develop into being a snap shooter but most snap shooters never get the bowl back to the full draw moist nap shooters are suffering from this a little thing I'm talking about it's called freezing never get the ball back far enough for that reason they're aiming is haphazard and it doesn't impart all the velocity to the arrow that the ball would if we were to pull back all the way I went through that there was a couple of years when I went on and I wished I wouldn't see a deer to shoot at because I knew that I wouldn't shoot well matter of fact I made a film our first year hunting film now under that condition amazing I lost it a couple of good chances and some deer where I was hoping I wouldn't see it there terribly well I said because of this I found that if I'm in concentrate right from the top of my head to the end of my toes on the very very center of the target not the bullseye but the center of the bullseye and if I talk to myself at each shot and pulled the ball all the way back until I came to folderol that I had things pretty well ripped and I used a heavy ball because I had people helped me this blitzball I've been shooting is 65 pounds I shot that Alton I found that it suppose heavier you get a better loose and everything works out better so I'm a snap shooter and I am aiming when I'm drawing it's like you ask a pitcher how does he throw the ball right across the outside corner of the plate he doesn't have any mechanical way to do it the body a human body is a great piece of equipment and you can buy practice and training teach it to do almost anything and when you have practice shooting instinctively and I mean instinctively I don't mean with a string walking or or a gap system I mean just by concentrate from the end of your toes to the top of your head on the very tiny spot that you want to hit it's amazing what the body can do and that's the way the pitcher does he doesn't but practice how does he the outfielder he's the ball in and hits the ground and into the catcher's mitt the first hop when the fellow still home how did you how does the carpenter hit the nail on the head it's all in the human body to be able to do that from practice so my style of shooting has always been since from the last four years instinctive shooting and by this snap shooting method and it's worked out for me I don't recommend it to anybody because it takes a lot of practice and a lot of concentration and you have to have I think a certain knack a certain feel to be good at it the same as there are good pitchers in there bad pitches fellows it can throw the ball to home plate on the first bounce and the fellows who can't so as I say I don't recommend it to anyone unless you want to go that route it's just a great and you don't have to even think when when you're faced with a an animal that you want to shoot it you only have to think about you just go through it and after you've made a fine shot you can't tell anybody how you did it it just happens and so along comes a compound bow yes I went belly-up and I'll tell you with the one of our very first compound bows and I tell you I couldn't hit anything I found that when I tried to shoot a compound bow snap shooting when I came over that hump I'd lost everything I've lost the field I had no idea where the air was gonna go and I charted for two days and I've finally finished a hunt by putting a site on my bow on the ball and I could do a little better but I cannot shoot a compound bow concentration is is the main thing in shooting instinctively you will never shoot a good tournament score because a human system cannot stand a whole day of kind of concentration that is needed to be a good instinctive shooter the system can't stand it it's just your blow-up you'll have a nervous breakdown if you try to try to do it and I think that's true with uh with a baseball pitcher too he gets tired and and he can't concentrate and they have to take him out and put another phone in my system of a shooting and stinky my snap shooting system is aiming at the time I am throwing the ball and I don't stick my hand out and pull up a bike like this the boys first in the end the hand comes back and when my hand gets back here to the Anchor which is my this finger in the corner of my mouth the thing is gone I cannot hold if I try to hold I lose everything I've lost it the thing has gotta go when I get back there because that's when everything is right the ball hands taking care of the elevation and everything's working good I'm not concerned about distances in yards I'm concerned only in distances of feel and I found that in in distances of feel and distances even that you step off or whether it my heritage is marked if there's low ground or high ground between you and the target the distance is further than you thought it was and you had to allow for that but in my if I shoot an arrow and let's say it drops low I cannot to make an adjustment I have to shoot that arrow exactly the same way as it did the other one but aunt I get a little better elevation I pull the arrow back a little further that's the only way big correction and and it's a screwy kind of thing but that's the way I have to work this thing out but works out so good for me I've had such good luck with it I would hate to try to change another system but maybe if I were younger I would what's the best shot you ever made Oh telling her I shot the running deer bang fast Nick your background bring the basket a picture ever there's three of us and a gun yeah we're making the drive driving up a draw or a canyon and there were three of us on the stand I was over on the left side friend of mine Knickerbocker was in the middle and he made this big mistake in getting a bunch of brush and somebody over the other end and this buck came to a very nice book date point whitetail and he was really carrying the mail and it couldn't he got himself and into these bushes knew he had no way to shoot and the deer was coming right towards where he was and he saw Nick and he had the veer out around and I saw it Nick was never gonna get an arrow off and I just instinctively threw one over there it was about 60 yards and the deer was on the dead run and I mean a good shot on that was luck how I did it I don't know I couldn't put reconstruct the whole thing I just know that pulled up and shot and my practice had did in the past and taking care of everything the body given by it's a great thing I shot a I'm in luck and a tiger hunt in F in the India we were we get beated the tiger and the tiger was known to be up in the draw and I was up we're making a film at a photographer and the photographer and the Maharaja were in a bind up on a tree this was a place where they they beated Tigers had been for hundreds of years and they had these this was he was up in the blinds and they took some boards and made a place of the tree he was up there with a gun and with the photography he's protecting the tog refer and I in the top of a palm tree that had been cut off about 30 feet up and they they put me up there in the ladder and then they took a ladder way so the tiger couldn't come up there to keep me company and then they had about 15 a that's making the drive and they were pounding on cans and shooting was loading guns and beating the trees with sticks and yelling and it was a very steep wall canyon on the other side there was a stone wall nothing could climb and was about a hundred yards over there I was looking over at some brush was in the bottom but here was this stone wall it went up a couple hundred feet and I looked over and saw this tiger and he was pacing back and forth and the Maharaja told me they had some hunters there on one an elephants and some other hunters up trees the tiger had to be killed this was serious business because these natives were out there driving and you know they want to get something out of it and the Tigers wouldn't be eating up their children or their cattle and sheep and goats so the tiger had to be killed it was from that point of view not a sporting thing and I expected that to hear somebody's gun go off real soon and the tiger was would be dead and the hunt would be over because it was too far from me and that that didn't happen then after oh I guess sound like I felt like five minutes Behaim probably fifty seconds I said to myself well maybe if I shoot an arrow beyond him maybe you come my way rattling around the rocks here and I shot it now that I expected to go over him but went right to his lungs and I had me a tiger so normally you don't take long shots like yet and yes you go hunting it's the fair chase enters into it and you shouldn't take long shots with a bore gun for fear of not hitting animal in the right place and crippling it but we all do we get excited and those kinds of thing happens but you ask me or I was asking I'm frequently asked what's the longest shot I ever did and I shot a deer a little farther than that but that was I normally don't shoot that for I like to get real close but sometimes you can get too close so then you got a problem also and I've been I've done it both ways [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Bear Archery

Views: 167,321

Keywords: Bear Archery, Bear Bows, Compound Bows, Hunting Bow, traditional Bows, Youth Bows

Id: wBOWNHKKm5M

Length: 38min 28sec (2308 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 18 2019