John Middendorf delves deep into the story of rock climbing from the engineered tools perspective. He considers the varied attitudes toward the use of 'artificial aids' in climbing, and how the standards of climbing have changed as various tools are used and accepted. Three volumes are planned: Volume 1 mostly covers early European developments up to the 1930s, and Volume 2 focuses more on North American developments to the 1930s, though all articles are written with a global perspective. This material was written in rough draft form on bigwallgear.com in a series of research articles.
