I have been doing a bit of writing rather than programming for the last couple of days, and in my research I have unearth a great book on Mountaineering. It comes from The Badminton Library on Sports and Pastimes, and dates from 1892. The book has been digitised by google, and there is an online link here.
I have been really intrigued by some of the information in there, as to a certain extent it has counteract certain claims (mainly by wikipeadia taken from modern sources) I have read about the history of design. This combined with another great google feature, where you can search for Patents has done something to skew the ‘convientational wisdom’ of who invented what an when.
Most people would attribute the crampon to Oscar Eckenstein and the carabiner to Otto Herzog. However there are references pre-dating the 1908 Eckenstein claim of invention of the 10 point crampon. Where as claims that Herzog’s made the first carabiner in 1910, are pre-dated by patents for ‘identical’ albeit not climbing specific snap-gate loops.
It part of a little project I am trying to write on the History of the Science of Mountaineering, where I am combining the contextual setting of the time in terms of culture and understanding of the world, put against the development of Mountaineering: Its equipment and practices.