I couldn't begin to peg the year, but well remember the first spinner I saw. Belonged to a doctor and his son who brought it with them and was the talk of our camp. Having gotten rave reviews from another guide, the big cheese insisted I see it in action, so we put Doc & son in a blind in a spot I'd been using as refuge for mine and another on that farm and watched the show. The thing did, in fact, pull ducks from the stratosphere, but even then an observant soul could watch many peel off as they approached it, and both my blind and the other non-spinnered but guided blind had better/quicker hunts.
I was underwhelmed, but the boss was still sold and bought me one of first available in our area, an Autoduck, the following season, and my own experience pretty much mirrored what I'd seen. Even in its first season of general usage in our area, the spinner was a whole lot better at starting big ducks than finishing them, and I've not forgotten that it ended five of its first seven days at my blind under the bench. No remotes in those days, so I'd have it out until a bunch of birds gave it a pass and then couldn't be called back to finish, get POed and pick it up - until some I thought it might have broken passed without breaking for me, and I'd put it back out again. The running joke was that what made the birds fly best was my jumping out of the blind to set or pull the spinner. But by the end of that first season, it seldom came out from under the bench, and it was retired to the shed after September teal season until the late in the 2006-2007 regular season, when I broke it out to help take advantage of my current marsh blind's otherwise generally too distant to influence teal flight.
Since then a spinner has been a permanent fixture at my little "mudhole" blind, albeit modified to be inconspicuous from above when turned off (by hard-wiring through a toggle in the blind) for most everything but teal:
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