It's a vintage military, tool check, or regular key tag.
Ah cool thanks! Do you know what the cutout mates up with? I see in your screenshots that they're all keyed various ways, I'm guessing they went into some kind of punch machine or something along those lines?
Edit: best I found is from here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1859307
To facilitate the reassembly of the articles in customers groups, tag holders are provided, and to make confusion impossible, these holders are provided with characteristic admittance means, the tags having similar characteristic admittance means so that only-the tags of a certain number (and therefore of 'a certain customer) may be assembled on the holder having that number.
Makes it sound like there was a sort of rail that matched the cutout to mistake proof putting one person's tagged clothes bags back together after they were laundered.
Good find. I kept noticing different patent numbers on them and was a little confused, since the safety pin has its own patent and was created before these things. To further my confusion, I also found this page which shows a key attached to the pin.
Very interesting rabbit hole!
Have you tried reverse image searches on google or yandex?
I did try a reverse search on Google, but it only gave me padlocks for some reason. Another poster found it though, thanks.
You should try posting it to the "What is this thing" community.
I can't figure out a way to link to a community from within the jerboa app, but the web url for it is:
https://lemmy.ml/c/whatisthisthing
I wish it was like reddit where I could just type:
/c/whatisthisthing
And it would link to the local community. Oh well.
Good luck!
I didn't realize there was one, thanks! I just figured out how to subscribe to external communities earlier today, so the link will get me there.
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