"O, What a Tangled Web We Weave When First We Practice to Deceive!"

That familiar saying by Scottish novelist Walter Scott (1771-1832) is similar to the way I've felt since stumbling onto an Internet story a couple days ago. I've gone in circles since then, trying to find the pieces of the puzzle I feel are missing. I happened onto another lead yesterday evening, but when I checked it out this morning, I again came up empty-handed.

Let me clarify that I don't really think David Meeks, a reporter with the Sun-Sentinel at the time, set out to deceive anyone with this story. For some unknown reason, though, no one bothered to tell the rest of the story (e.g., like whatever happened to the inventors and their invention). In the meantime, here is what I know so far:

Around Halloween 1998, auto mechanic Ralph Millen (age 45 at the time, so would only be 62 today) and his wife, Janet, or "Queen," as he calls her, were in Mount Dora, FL, for a week's vacation. A greatly anticipated highlight of their vacation was a fishing trip to Lake Dora. It was going to be a chance for Millen to satisfy his passion for bass fishing, which dates back to his childhood on a small lake in Michigan. What they couldn't have known is that the fishing trip wouldn't turn out the way they had hoped.

In a nutshell, Millen's equipment that day didn't cooperate. As any bass angler who uses spinning equipment will tell you, "lateral line twist" is an unavoidable annoyance. When the twisting is extensive, it occasionally works itself farther up and causes backlash from the line severely overwrapping itself inside the reel. In a worst-case scenario, you can't cast, nor can you reel. That's what happened to Millen, who was left holding a massive tangle of uselessness.

"It was the only reel I had that day," said Millen, "so, basically, I got a real expensive boat ride. I didn't get to fish nothin'. I ended up just pouting in the boat a little bit."

That day's episode bothered Millen all night, and he started brainstorming about it. While his life's work was car repair, he also had experience as a commercial artist and hailed from a family of design engineers. He started designing and drawing, looking for a solution that, as far as he knew, had eluded the major fishing-tackle companies--a system that would not cause lateral line twist. And he came up with something.

"Honestly, I designed it just for me," he noted, "but after I field-tested it a couple of times, I couldn't believe the difference. It went from being a problem to no problem at all. It virtually eliminated lateral line twist."

Millen's concept was amazingly simple. He redesigned the bullet weight used with soft plastics so that a swivel would fit inside the weight. The concealed swivel allowed the bait to spin freely, with no subsequent line twist.

He showed the invention to his brother-in-law, Walter Schatzel (age 38 at the time, so would only be 55 today), a detective with the Hollywood, FL Police Department, who, like Millen, was a weekend warrior on area lakes. After trying the gadget, Schatzel said, "Ralph, this is so simple. Somebody must have already come up with the same thing or something similar."

Millen and Schatzel looked through every tackle catalog they could find but didn't come across a single trace of anything like it. They then hired a lawyer and checked with the U.S. Patent Office but still could not find anything like it. So they patented the invention as a "Millennium Twist" (the out-of-focus photo at the beginning is the only one of the invention I could find). Here's the online link to their patent: https://www.google.com/patents/WO2001087061A1?cl=en. Then came the big step: finding some pros who would try it.

They got the Millennium Twist into the hands of Gary Dobyns and Dave Rush, who both gave it rave reviews. "I was waiting for someone to burst my bubble," said Millen, "telling me they had used something like this for years. Instead, though, Dobyns and Rush were asking where they could get more of these. Rush even wrote a testimonial, calling the Millennium Twist 'a must for any fisherman who uses fishing line.'"

Soon, major tackle companies got interested, and Millen reached agreements with Eagle Claw hooks, Bullet weights, and Culprit worms. Those companies made gear to Millen's specifications and shipped it to his garage, which, at the time, was in Miramar, FL. At one point, that gear, including 200,000 artificial worms, a pallet of weights, 1.2 million hooks, and some very high hopes, shared space with all of Millen's auto-repair equipment.

In April 2000, Millen still hadn't made a dime of profit off his invention, but he and Schatzel still were assembling each one by hand...and they were starting to get noticed. Customers were able to order them through a now-nonexistent website (where you supposedly could get a 100-piece set, including a variety of hooks pre-attached to barrel swivels, for $29.95 a set), and Millen just had signed a deal with the Home Shopping Network for a series of infomercials.

"I'm hoping this someday is my primary source of revenue," he said. "I don't want to be greasy the rest of my life."

In 1998, sales of fishing tackle, not including major items like boats, had reached $44 billion, so it was rather amazing that no one in research and development at some huge company had thought of this idea before Millen.

He wasn't looking to make a fortune with his invention. Instead, he just wanted to find something that would prevent line twist, so he could spend more time fishing and less time working.

Believe it or not, this is where the story I found online just suddenly stops, with absolutely no further indication of whatever happened to the Millennium Twist or its inventors. As I said in the beginning, though, I'm still digging, so hope springs eternal. It seems bizarre to me that someone would go to the trouble of getting a patent for his invention, and then just suddenly drop the whole idea, but then I don't claim to be a mind-reader.