The Rise and Fall of Svea & Optimus: The Brass Stoves That Fed Every Expedition

Subscribe — every week I dig into the stories behind the brands they tried to erase. The Primus stove fed Roald Amundsen at the South Pole in 1911. It boiled water for Hillary and Tenzing on Everest the night before their summit in 1953. The Svea 123, introduced in 1955, was the first compact backpacking stove ever made — and it went to the top of the world with more expeditions than any other single piece of cooking equipment in history. Today the Svea 123 is made in Taiwan. The Swedish workshops are gone. In this video I tell the full story — from factory mechanic Frans Wilhelm Lindqvist solving the soot problem with a blowtorch in Stockholm in 1892, to Carl Richard Nyberg building Svea stoves in Sundbyberg while also building one of Scandinavia's first aircraft, to the WWII military production that equipped Allied forces across multiple fronts, to the Svea 123 that made the roar of a camp stove synonymous with the American backcountry for twenty years, to the MSR WhisperLite and canister stoves that slowly took the market, to the 2007 Katadyn acquisition that moved production out of Sweden forever. The factories are silent. A stove bought in 1960 still runs perfectly today.