Clean climbing: from pitons to nuts and cams.

British beginnings: pebbles and machine nuts

Wikipedia says clean protection, meaning removable gear rather than hammered pitons, goes back at least partly to the 1920s or earlier in England. It reports that Morley Wood was the first to use pebbles slung on rope for protection, on Pigott's Climb at Clogwyn Du'r Arddu in North Wales, in 1926. Wikipedia hedges this with "reportedly".

In the 1950s, Wikipedia says, English climbers swapped the pebbles for machine nuts threaded on slings. Climbing lore, repeated in Climbing magazine's "The Nut Chronicles" (seen as a search summary), places the birthplace of the climbing nut beside the Snowdon Mountain Railway on the approach to Clogwyn Du'r Arddu, where climbers picked up engineering nuts. A search summary of Wikipedia's nut article says climbers bored out the threads and smoothed the edges so the nuts would not cut the cord.

The first nut made for climbing

Wikipedia reports that John Brailsford of Sheffield was the first to make nuts specifically for climbing, in 1961, again with "reportedly". A UK climbing retailer's history of the nut corroborates the 1961 date and calls Brailsford's design, the Acorn, the first nut designed for the purpose. The same account quotes Brailsford himself saying it is very hard to credit anyone with first using machined nuts, because many engineers were doing similar things at the time. So the "first" rests on a hedged encyclopedia entry and a shop's account that quotes the inventor doubting it.

The American shift, 1960s to 1973

In the United States the change came later, and Wikipedia gives most of the detail:

• Early 1960s. Chrome-molybdenum pitons replaced softer iron ones. Because they could be removed and reused, they were used more, and rock damage increased. In the same years John Reppy brought nylon-slung machine nuts from Britain to Ragged Mountain, Connecticut, about a decade before nuts caught on in the US.
• 1967. Royal Robbins brought artificial chockstones back from England and used them alone on the first ascent of Nutcracker in Yosemite Valley.
• 1971. John Stannard stopped carrying pitons, started a "First All-Nut Ascent" logbook at a shop in New Paltz, New York, and in October published "The Eastern Trade". Yvon Chouinard began making calibrated metal chocks commercially in California.
• Around 1972. Bill Forrest also made passive chocks and experimented with camming devices.

Who coined the phrase "clean climbing" is uncertain even within one source. Wikipedia credits Stannard's 1971 article, but the same article says the term may have emerged generally around 1970, while nuts and hexes were being adopted quickly.

Wikipedia says pitons were eliminated as the main form of protection in North America in under three years, with broad adoption of clean protection by about 1972 to 1973. The National Park Service's climbing history (2021) says removable protection in the 1960s and 1970s sharply reduced the use of pitons, which damaged rock, and that clean climbing was favoured to protect park resources.

The 1972 Chouinard Equipment catalogue

Chouinard Equipment, the forerunner of Patagonia, made climbing hardware. Adventure Journal (Stephen Casimiro, undated) says its 1972 catalogue carried a fourteen-page essay by Doug Robinson, "The Whole Natural Art of Protection", which argued for using fewer pitons and other permanent hardware in favour of removable chocks, hexes and stoppers. Wikipedia says the catalogue held two articles on the environment and climbing gear: one by Chouinard and his partner Tom Frost, and Robinson's essay. Patagonia's own account, seen as a search summary, says the catalogue opened with a note from Chouinard and Frost urging customers to stop using pitons.

A scan of the catalogue posted by R. A. Hutchins in 2002 lists the opening statement on pages 2 and 3, the Hexentrics on pages 8 and 9, the Stoppers on pages 10 and 11, and Robinson's essay on pages 12 to 25. Steve Grossman, interviewed on the same page in December 2001, credited the catalogue and its hexes and stoppers with making low-impact climbing practical and with explaining British low-impact ethics to American climbers.

The catalogue's motive has been read two ways. Adventure Journal points out that Chouinard also made the removable hardware the essay promoted. A Mountain Project forum commenter, seen as a search summary, called Robinson's piece an advertisement dressed as an article. That is one person's view, set against the reading of the catalogue as an environmental statement.

The invention of the cam

The early history of the camming idea, as the sources give it:

• Wikipedia says Vitaly Abalakov made the first climbing use of the cam principle, with cams cut from a pulley wheel that looked like later Tricams. It gives no date.
• Climbing magazine (27 May 2020, excerpting Matt Samet's "The Climbing Dictionary", 2011) says Greg Lowe developed a single cable-retracted cam called the Crack Jumar from 1967.
• Wikipedia says Greg Lowe filed a patent in 1973 for a cam with a constant angle, using a logarithmic spiral. A later patent filing listed on Justia cites US Patent 3,877,679 as Lowe's; we did not check its grant date.
• According to Wikipedia, Greg Lowe invented the Tricam, a hybrid of nut and cam, in 1973, and it reached the market in 1981.

Ray Jardine and the Friend

Climbing magazine's 2020 history says Ray Jardine began a design with two sliding wedges in 1971 that did not work out. In the summer of 1973 Mike Lowe sold Jardine three Lowe Cam Nuts; Kris Walker says all three walked out of the crack in testing in Eldorado Canyon. Walker and Jardine then built about two dozen prototypes, and Jardine took prototypes to Yosemite in 1974 (Climbing magazine; Yosemite Climbing Museum).

The Yosemite Climbing Museum's caption says Jardine used the devices in secret on some of the hardest cracks of the time, including The Phoenix in Yosemite in 1977, which the museum calls the world's first 5.13. That "first" is the museum's claim and was not confirmed elsewhere.

Wikipedia says Jardine invented the modern spring-loaded camming device in 1978, citing US Patent 4,184,657, dated 22 January 1980, with opposing spring-loaded cams set at a 13.75 degree camming angle. Climbing magazine says Jardine Enterprises began selling Friends in the US in 1977, and that the newly formed Wild Country licensed the idea and took Friends to the mass market from 1978.

The disputes

The museum says early Friends came only in whole sizes and had a clip that could fall out, and that later versions had a stronger fixing and half sizes. Its caption says the Friend changed climbing forever. Wikipedia says spring-loaded cams became generally available around 1980, and lists later developments without dates: the Technical Friend with a cable stem, Black Diamond's dual-axle Camalot, three-lobed small cams, Omega Pacific's Link Cam, offset cams and Totem cams.

Today's nuts and cams, and the standards they are tested to, are described on cams and nuts. Other gear history is on equipment history.