The "Granton" otter trawl was the standard design used in the British distant-water fisheries from the 1930s until the 1970s and was the trawl used in some routine resource surveys in UK waters and elsewhere. I know of one reference to it published in 1929 [F.M. Davis (1929) “Preliminary note on experimental trawling with cod-end meshes of different sizes” Journal du Conseil 4: 287-299] but I can't find any source that records when the design first came into use. I'll guess that it was first produced by one of the net lofts in Granton, Edinburgh but I can't find confirmation of that either.

Please note that I am asking about the Granton trawl in the strict sense of the one particular design (even though that design saw some minor variation down the years and was manufactured in various sizes). I do understand that some authors have misused "Granton trawl" as an alternative for "otter trawl".

I am also well aware of the common, but entirely erroneous, supposition that the Granton trawl was a net introduced by James Scott (of Granton) in 1894. I have a paper on the introduction of otter trawls that will be out in a few weeks and which explores Scott's contributions and those of his contemporaries.

My remaining doubt concerns the later net that took the name of his home town.