Carabiner, or karabiner, is the shortened version of Karabinerhaken which literally means karbine hook; karbine being the old world for a rifle. The actual hooks were used to attach the carrying sling to the rifle. The French call their Carabiners ,’mousequeton’, musket hook, which means the same thing. Salewa seems to have started making climbing gear in Munich, Germany in 1935 and made equipment for the German Army during the Second World War – it seems that they moved to Austria some time after that. We’re not quite sure when they started making karabiners, but the ones we have here date from the early 1970’s and were the lightest ones around at the time, making them very popular with big wall climbers in America who carried lots and lots of karabiners and consequently wanted them to be light. These two actually came from a collector friend of Mick Tighe’s called Art McCarthy, who lives in California, so they may well have been up a couple of big walls.