584 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 196 2 



head access to the book on Turkish archery realized the challenge 

 which confronted them in the Turkish records, and proceeded to work 

 at closing the wide gap between those records and the much shorter 

 distances attainable with the longbow, or straight self bow of wood. 

 Prior to publication of the book, some of them had already made 

 changes in the longbow. They used limbs of rectangular section, 

 shortened them to the limit of safety, and provided them with ears. 

 This was the begiiming of progress. The wood most frequently used 

 in making flight bows was osage orange, a very strong, hard, resilient 

 North American wood, named bois d'arc by the French explorers 

 because they found it being used by many Indian tribes for bows. 

 Seasoned osage orange wood of good quality has mechanical prop- 

 erties approximating those of horn, making the use of the latter as 

 compression material unnecessary. Sinew fiber was, however, used 

 for bacldng, to safeguard the limbs against breakage from possible 

 flaws in the wood, and to witlistand the high tensile stress which 

 develops in a bend of short radius. They had learned from the book 

 how the Turkish craftsman prepared the sinew and glue, and how he 

 applied the sinew fiber, in a glue matrix, to the bow. With such 

 transitional models of bows, flight distances increased through the 

 400's of yards into the low 500's. 



Research and development during and since the war produced plas- 

 tics with excellent characteristics for reliably storing and releasing 

 energy through stress loading and unloading. Mass production at 

 low cost of glass fibers was perfected, making long parallel fibers of 

 glass readily available. Strong plastics with fiber glass reinforce- 

 ment are now in regular if not exclusive use in the construction of 

 bows of all kinds. Except in certain kinds of specialized, custom- 

 built bows, sinew fiber, horn, and osage orange wood have been dis- 

 placed by the new materials. The bow of the 1960's is composite in 

 the Turkish tradition, though in modified pattern, influenced by the 

 designs which developed from the research studies of the longbow. 



Plates 4 and 5 represent one commercial form of modern bow, re- 

 laxed, braced, and at full draw. Although resemblance to the Turk- 

 ish bow is manifest both in appearance and its composite structure, 

 the straight-limbed bow of rectangular limb section had a strong in- 

 fluence upon its development also, as an intermediate phase after the 

 longbow. The limbs are rectangular in section, with adequate width 

 to insure stability against twisting as the bow is drawn. Moreover, 

 the design is aimed at employing the whole limb, including the back- 

 wardly curved ends, for storing energy. The lesson learned from 

 the bow with rectangular limb section, bending in circular arcs, is 

 that each limb is "working" throughout, with approximately the same 

 stored energy in each unit of volume of the stressed limb. In the 

 Turkish bow only about one-half the length of each limb is under 

 great stress when the bow is drawn. In the modern bow, which is 



