The Surprising Birth of The 'American Flatbow' \ Paul Comstock, Article 2\7

© 2025 Paul Comstock

The Surprising Birth of The 'American Flatbow' 

 By Paul Comstock

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 In the last issue I told how the rounded-belly English longbow was the basic design used exclusively by recreational American archers, descendants of Europeans, up to the 1930s.

  The widespread use of flat bellies didn't happen until after 1930.

  For a brief time in the 1980s, I assumed flatbows became popular because those archers of European descent began to experiment with Native American designs. I was shocked to learn I was wrong. There was no such widespread experimentation before 1930, and I always will be slightly amazed there wasn't.

  English speaking archers before 1930 might have believed the rounded belly was superior to anything else, or they might have just gone along with the crowd without giving the question any thought.

  The former possibility would have been reinforced by Saxon Pope's 1923 book A Study of Bows and Arrows. It describes Pope's flight shooting tests on a variety of aboriginal bows, and his conclusion that the round-belly English bow was superior because it outshot all of them. He summarized those results in Hunting With the Bow and Arrow.

  The latter book contains a few sentences on the variation of the rounded belly, viewed in cross-section.

  It noted "a high-crested contour" results in "a quick, lively cast" while "a very flat curve ... follows the string." This implies the more deeply rounded a belly, the more energy it can store per pound of draw. If that idea was widespread, it had to be discredited before the rise of the flatbow could begin.

  In the 1930s, it was discredited. And how it happened is a story as interesting as any in archery history.

  In 1929, a newly published archery book contained a sentence which most readers probably ignored at the time. Yet it is the earliest evidence I have found that signaled change was in the air.

  The book was "Modern Archery: A Text Book on the Art of Shooting for Accuracy With the Bow and Arrow." Its author was Arthur Lambert Jr., a capable competitor in the National Archery Association.

  The sentence is on Page 14 and says, "Within the past year ... Mr. Clarence N. Hickman of Brooklyn, N.Y., has made some interesting studies of a scientific and mathematical nature in regard to bows and arrows in the laboratories of the research department of the American Piano Company."

  Lambert easily could have called him "Dr. Clarence N. Hickman," because the man had a Ph.D., apparently in physics. The American Piano Company apparently was his employer at the time.

  In 1930, the magazine Ye Sylvan Archer printed an article by Hickman, and in 1931 it printed four. They included graphs and advanced math formulas on strains and stresses in wooden bows, as affected by things like bow length, brace height, etc. I can imagine the average reader might have yawned and thought "So what?" -- because I probably would have at the time.

  I have read all of Hickman's articles. (More on this later, plus the chronology I describe here.) It's easy to picture him as the scientist he was, intently focused on his charts and calculations, fastidious in his mechanical descriptions, and writing for an audience as well educated as he was.

  Yet despite everything Hickman knew and described through 1931 about the neutral plane in a bow limb, and stresses and strain, he did not directly challenge tradition and say point-blank that wooden bows would have less string follow and more cast per pound (all else being equal) if they had flat bellies. The closest he came was a 1931 article that calculated the stresses on pieces of wood bent with one end held in a clamp.

  However, another Ph.D. named Paul Klopsteg understood the implications of everything Hickman was saying. He understood them so well, in fact, that he credited Hickman with solving the problem of the best cross-section for a wooden bow.

  In the January 1932 Ye Sylvan Archer, Klopsteg presented a bow design of rectangular cross-section, the same thickness along its length, with all tapering done to the limbs' width -- what today is sometimes called a pyramid bow, with the limbs fading into a narrow, rigid handle. The stresses of this design, he said, would be much less than that of the English round belly.

  So much so, Klopsteg wrote, that the bow can be considerably shorter than the English. The limb tiller, he said, would be uniformly circular.

  This matched essential points that Hickman made: Tests by the federal Forest Products Laboratory showed the majority of wood species fail in compression much more easily and quickly than in tension; the English round belly moves the neutral plane (where the limb is neither in compression or tension) toward the back, increasing compression; and the neutral plane will be dead center in a symmetrical cross-section, by comparison reducing compression.

  By now, at the least, bright and alert bowyers were paying attention. Could all of this be true? It is clear that at least a few people were determined to see if it was.

  In June and July articles in The Archery Review in 1933, Forrest Nagler laid it out with the most direct language yet seen.  

  He wrote, "Bows must not break. Stress is what breaks a bow ... Sections should approximate the rectangular rather than any form of 'arch' (i.e., rounded belly) in order that the maximum possible number of highly stressed fibers may be secured." Put another way, his "maximum possible number" translates to stress distributed as evenly as possible across the limbs' cross-section. This would reduce the crushing strain a rounded belly endures at its deepest point.

  Nagler added a new innovation: The uniform limb thickness described by Klopsteg was not necessary. It could be avoided in a limb with tapered thickness by making the tiller elliptical. Which means the curve of the limb could gradually increase as the limbs gradually grew thinner, and the strain on the limbs would be uniformly distributed.

  Spelled out this way, the implications become more clear: Too much stress breaks bows. Too much stress creates excessive string follow. String follow slows arrow speed. Flatter bellies reduce stress. All else being equal, the more efficient bow will have less string follow.

  And physics -- which tells us why gravity keeps us on the ground and why the sun rises in the morning -- confirmed it.

  Skilled bowyers began to try what Nagler said, and found it was indeed true. The bows had less string follow and flatter trajectory per pound of draw weight.

  And -- significant for the time -- Nagler's ideas could immediately be applied to a large U.S. supply of long and narrow yew, osage and lemonwood staves, seasoned and ready to go. The result could look almost (but not exactly) like the old English style, but with a much flatter belly and more elliptical tiller.

  The use of flatter bellies spread, almost like wildfire.

  "Skilled bowyers" is an operative term here. If we make mistakes during bow construction, any design can have too much string follow. But for a novice, a flatter belly can at least reduce the odds of breaking a bow. That was my experience. Even Klopsteg noted an efficient bow cannot work miracles, like instantly turning a poor shot into a good one.

  But there were lots of skilled bowyers in the 1930s and two of them -- W. Ben Hunt and John Metz -- wrote "The Flat Bow" in 1936.

  While the book does not credit Hickman, Klopsteg and Nagler, the practical implications of their articles were boiled down into a great little how-to book written for the homecrafter.

  The book shows cross-sections that are not hard rectangles, but much wider than thick, with rounded edges and slightly rounded bellies.

  In his 1946 book Target Archery, Robert Elmer said such concessions to artistic sensibilities pose no significant compromise to the flat bow principle. But a pure rectangular cross-section is even more resistant to compression, and I've made many that way, with the corners rounded just enough to minimize damage from dents and dings.

  "The Flat Bow" contains several allusions to a fact many people understood -- that recreational archers were finally coming around to bow design advantages that Native Americans had figured out long before European descendants did.

   Among bows sold commercially, flat bellies also began to take over the market in the 1930s.

  As I said in the last installment here, A.E. Andrews described in a 1948 article how powerful and lethal the 72-inch round-belly English style bows of the 1920s could be. We can still make them, if we choose. The flatter bellies let us make bows shorter, with lower draw weights, and get similar performance.

  To put it another way, flat bellies let us do different things, but the round-belly English style longbow was never a failed concept, nor is it now.

  Without the real-world savvy of Nagler, Hunt and Metz, I wonder how long it might have taken for flat bows to catch on. They clearly were thinking of adapting the new findings into the existing archery scene.

  Even if someone in the 1930s and early 1940s could completely understand all that Hickman and Klopsteg wrote, it would have required having copies of the different magazines in which the articles appeared.

  Long after the most practical lessons were absorbed, all of the published articles of Hickman, Klopsteg and Nagler were compiled in a book (which they edited) called "Archery: The Technical Side." It was printed in 1947 by the National Field Archery Association. I have read only 500 copies were printed and proceeds were donated to the NFAA.

  A copy of the 1947 edition sits on my desk as I write this. It says "first edition," but I have no evidence there was a second edition.

  The chronology of the articles as I have described them here is outlined in the book. It's more than 270 pages long and covers a wide variety of topics. It's the ultimate source for anybody who wants to read the articles, obviously. But the book is hard to find, and it's more than a mere book. Each copy is a valuable artifact of archery history. I know of at least one reprint in the latter 20th century, and it might be harder to find than the original.

  I explain this for two reasons. One, I don't own the copy on my desk. I got it through inter-library loan. I was told any libraries that have copies might hold them in reserve, meaning they could not be loaned out. This could still happen. So if you end up getting a copy through inter-library loan, I beg you: Take good care of it and make sure you return it. Please.

  Two, unless the reader is adept at college-level physics and/or calculus (and I am not), he or she won't be able to understand all those math calculations, which appear in thick abundance. I first got a library copy many years ago, read it and copied a few pages. I wanted to borrow it again to make sure I was remembering all this stuff right.

  A better source for most of us is Elmer's book "Target Archery" of 1946. It contains a concise summary of what Hickman and others wrote, and it's much easier to understand. It also had a very big press run and today copies are far easier to find.

  It was true in the 1930s and more recently that many folks (novice or otherwise) paid almost no attention to the fact that excessive strain will damage or destroy a wooden bow. They tended to blame such failures on something else, such as "the wood's no good."  

  In an April 1936 article in The Archery Review, veteran yew dealer and bowyer Earl Ullrich wrote about this at length. He wrote the article, he said, because of "five or six (yew) staves returned to me in a wrecked condition in as many months."

  A big part of the problem, he wrote, was that a demand for faster and lighter bows led bowyers to "construct weapons that are greatly exaggerated and therefore not durable."

  He added: "If you or your bowmaker force the action of a bow by excessive whip ending, recurving, setting limbs back in the grip or shortening the string, you are endangering the life of your bow." If those yew staves were breaking, things must have been really excessive.

  In the late 20th century, the problem I saw the most was trying to make a short bow (between 58 and 62 inches) draw 28 inches, particularly with a rounded belly. And I've seen the damage caused by drawing some less than 28. I am using past tense here, because I hope we're all avoiding such trouble in the 21st century. (Right?) Draw lengths like that are possible. But to pull it off consistently, even the smallest error in design or construction must be avoided.  And a flat belly certainly helps. A sinew backing also can help, if we have the sinew.

  If we are interested in an easy and safe approach (and I usually have been) the thing to do is make bows that are nice and long. I have no issue with hunting with a 68-inch bow, because that's what plenty of the old-timers did.

  Hunt and Metz knew that increasing bow length further reduces stress. "The Flat Bow" encourages its readers to start with a six-foot stave.

  I wrote long ago, and have seen, that if a wooden bow has two inches of string follow or less after resting unstrung overnight, it is a lethal hunting weapon on double-lung shots on deer if it pulls 50 pounds or thereabouts.

  Bows don't have to be devoid of string follow to be useful. And we can still use those pretty curved surfaces if we follow the advice of The Flat Bow and Robert Elmer.

  And to those who want to make full-length round-belly English longbows, I say make them. I do.

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