Mepps Aglia

The Mepps Aglia is a small in-line spinner for freshwater fishing. A straight steel wire runs from a twisted eye at the head to a treble hook at the tail; on it sit a ribbed metal body, a few beads, and a concave oval blade hung from a small clevis so that it turns around the wire as the lure is drawn through the water. The blade is stamped with the maker's name, the word Aglia and a size number.

It was devised in France by André Meulnart, an engineer who designed reels and lures in the 1930s and patented a spinner of this kind in 1938. He is said to have called it first the Shimmy, then the Aglia, after a moth whose fluttering flight the turning blade recalled. The flash and vibration of that blade are the whole of the lure's appeal to a fish; it imitates nothing in particular.

Its American career began by chance. Soldiers carried Mepps spinners home after the Second World War, and in 1951 one reached Todd Sheldon, a tackle dealer in Antigo, Wisconsin, who caught four large trout on it in an afternoon and began importing them. By 1960 American sales had passed half a million. Sheldon's firm later bought the French company outright, and Wisconsin hunters still sell it the squirrel tails used to dress its hooks.

The Aglia has since been joined by dozens of variants, dressed, weighted and painted, but the plain spinner remains the core of the range. The maker allows that the body has changed in finish, while holding that the blade, weight and balance have not. Advertisements from 1960 and 1965 show the same stamped oval blade and ribbed body that a tackle shop sells today, numbered from 0 to 5, for a few pounds each.