There’s much debate as to who, where, and when the first karabiners appeared on the world stage of mountaineering, somewhere between 1900 and 1920 seems to be the best guess! (A guy called Otto Herzog produced one in 1910). We do know that all the earliest ones were made of steel, which prevailed until lighter aluminium alloy versions came along in 1939, created by a Frenchman called Pierre Allain.

It took a long time for aluminium alloy karabiners to become the norm, so steel versions were still used for a decade or until the 1960s, which we reckon is when the three ‘Cassins” we have here in the collection came along. We are not exactly sure when, but it was around this time that karabiners were required to have the breaking strain stamped on them, “CARICA MINIMOROTTURA 1300KG” stamped on the back translates as ‘minimum breaking strain of 1300 kilograms, which is fairly low for a heavy, chunky karabiner.

Ricardo Cassin was a famous Italian mountaineer who created his own mountaineering equipment manufacturing business around 1947/8 at a place called Lecco in Italy. The Cassin brand was bought by another Italian company, CAMP, in 1997.

We trawled our karabiner graveyard to find these little fellas, so we don’t know where they came from before they died!