Fernand Petzl was a French caver who had a desire to improve the equipment being used by himself and his friends in the 1920’s and 30’s. With a guy called Pierre Chevalier, he produced various items of innovative gear throughout the 50’s and 60’s and in 1973 Produits Fernand Petzl produced their first mountaineering headlamp. Various forms of lanterns, torches, headlamps and the like had been around for centuries, but Petzl headlamps brought a certain sanity to moving around the mountains. Petzl introduced the zoom version of their headlamp(as we have here) in 1981 and we suspect this one dates from the late 1980’s when just about everybody had one – you could even buy your non-mountaineering relatives one for Christmas as they were bound to find a use for it! This one once belonged to Mick Tighe’s Mountain Guiding Company, Nevis Guides, and became redundant – along with millions of others – when LED torches came along.