Eduardo Fontela López was born in Santa Marta de Ortigueira with a firm vocation of work and persistence. Thanks to that, he came up from a bellboy position in the National Bank to the Director.
This is Eduardo Fontela: an active man, hunting and fishing amateur since he was a child.
Because of his tough personality, he decided to improve these spinners by himself for his own purpose. After that, their friends started using the improved spinners as a hobby. Finally, in 1985 they got the name of ‘Spinners EDU’, and they began to be commercialized.
Apart from the Spinners EDU, there are 831 different patterns with high levels of effectiveness in extreme conditions.
The success of these spinners is found in the way they place on the water without any weird noise, in the same way an insect would do it, so they don’t scare the trout.
Another feature is the wide variety of patterns adapted to any situation, including those when the water flow is very difficult. For those cases, you can use the unique spinner ‘000’. When the conditions get difficult, is time to use them, because they never fail.
Eduardo has always denied he is the inventor of these spinners, defending that he has only improved them to get the best results when fishing. He says that this invention was created so many years ago, at the beginning of the XIX century, by Julio Thompson Buel.
Julio Thompson Buel was born in East Poultney in 1806, and he grew up in Castleton. There, he worked as a furrier like his father, who had taught him the different fur treatments. Besides, they owned a little ship they used to enjoy their favorite activity: fishing on Lake Bomossen. One day, while Julio was eating on the boat, his spinner fell on the water and, while it was sinking, he could realize how it was dropping on the water by making spirals, so it attracted some fishes; even one of them took it away.
This made Julio, who had always dreamt about fishing a big trout, going home and take another spinner. He removed the handle and soldered a hook. After that, he came back to the lake, fishing two big trout with his new invention.
On his way back to the town, he showed his trophies and his invention to his neighbors, who were fishing amateurs like him. All of them wanted to try his new creation, so Julio made spinners for all the fishers, putting feathers on them and painting the convex side on red.
In 1827 he moved with his father to the city of Whitehall, where they ran a furriery and taxidermy business. Meanwhile, Julio was still making his spinners, in spite of the few sales. But this situation changed when he sent several samples to the sports journalist Frank Forester; he talked about the product in some articles and even in a book, making a big interest which started growing and growing until 1848. Since that moment, he decided to change his family fur business into a fishing business and finally, in 1852, he got his first patent.
Buel would bother a lot about the quality of his products, so he decided to name his half-brother, the jeweler Charles Pike, as the quality controller. Julio always tried to use the best materials for his spinners, so his business was very successful with no advertising needed.
Because of health problems, Julio had to sell his enterprise and patents to Charles Pike in 1885. In 1927 the company E. Hammond bought the business and ran it until the World War II. After the war, it had a lot of owners until 1974, when Eppinger bought it and ran it until nowadays.
Buel died in 1886, one year after he sold the enterprise, but he will always be reminded as the inventor of the undulating and revolving spinner, making a great contribution to sport fishing.
