The earliest documented case of a wire-cage baseball catchers style mask I can find comes from the 1936 Winter Olympics, a goalie by the name of Teiji Honma (Im guessin thats Finnish or Czech maybe?) wore a crude leather & wire cage; behind which sat a pair of coke bottle bottom glasses.
Teiji Honma was Japanese.
Another style worn around that time was a half-cage that protected the eyes. Canadian goalie Roy Musgrove wore one when he played in the British National League in the mid to late '30s.
an errant stick in 79 caught Bernie Parent in the eye forcing his retirement, along with a lot of goalies switching to the helmet/cage & hybrid glass.cage styles en-masse'.
People remember Parent's injury because of Parent's resumé, but goalies started switching to the helmet and cage (a.k.a. 'birdcages') in earnest in 1977, after Sabres goalie Gerry Desjardins suffered an eye injury after being hit by a slapshot in a game in February of '77.
It was as a result of this incident, not Parent's, that the moulded fibreglass mask was banned from minor hockey. Parent's injury was just more evidence to support the ban. Parent himself lamented the incident saying "Most of the new goalies are using these new masks with the helmet and bars. They're probably better. If I was wearing one of those I don't think this would have happened."
After Desjardins was injured he played a few more games but his vision was never the same (he suffered a trauma-induced cataract, for which he underwent surgery in the summer of '77) and he retired. Punch Imlach, then GM of the Sabres, outlawed the fibreglass mask on his team and required goalies Bob Sauve and Don Edwards to wear the 'birdcage'.
Other goalies who adopted them for the '77-'78 season were Islanders goalies Billy Smith and Chico Resch, former teammates of Desjardins (who played for the Islanders from '72 to '74). The Islanders also had Swedish goalie Goran Hogosta on their roster in '77, and he wore the helmet and cage à la Tretiak. Most of the Rockies' goalies wore them too; I know for sure Doug Favell, Michel Plasse and Bill Oleschuk did. So did Dan Bouchard of the Flames and Bunny Larocque of the Canadiens.
It was after Desjardins' injury that Dave Dryden worked with Greg Harrison to develop the 'hybrid' mask. Dryden started wearing it at the beginning of the '77-'78 WHA season.
As for the actual fiberglass-cage hybrid, that was first designed & used by Dave Dryden, Ken's older brother, who at the time was playing in the WHA. The first NHL goalie to use it was Glen "Chico" Resch. Exact year I dont know, but sometime between about 75-78.....
I'm not exactly sure when Resch started wearing a hybrid mask, but it was certainly no earlier than '79. By the time he was traded to the Rockies in 1981 he was wearing the hybrid, but Phil Myre started wearing a hybrid mask around the same time. The earliest I know of in the NHL,
for sure, was Dave Dryden himself, who wore it for a few games in the '79-'80 season. Teammate Eddie Mio, who took a slapshot in the face in practice in December of '79, was also an early adopter. Dave Dryden had announced his retirement only a few days earlier and was still with the Oilers when it happened, so after Mio went down Dryden gave him his mask.
Don Beaupre was also one of the first and probably
the first rookie to wear one in '80-'81. Shortly thereafter teammate Gilles Meloche started using one too. Beaupre quickly went back to a helmet and cage, but Meloche kept the hybrid for the rest of his career.
Roy may have popularized the hybrid mask after becoming the first goalie to win a Stanley Cup with one, but the first Canadiens goalie to wear one (that I know of) was Rick Wamsley.
Others who wore the hybrid mask before Roy included Marco Baron, Doug Soetaert, Mike Liut and Denis Herron.
Why was the hybrid mask not adopted quicker? Probably a result of many factors. For one, they weren't CSA approved. If they weren't CSA approved then kids in minor hockey couldn't wear them, thus by the time they made it to the NHL they were used to the helmet and cage. There was probably also some hesitation because they were based on the traditional mask not unlike Parent's. The problem with fibreglass masks was not only susceptibility to eye injuries but also the fact that they were in direct contact with the face. The masks couldn't absorb an impact; they just transferred that energy to the face. The purpose of the Plante mask was to prevent cuts, not to absorb impacts. It was quite common for a goalie's face to be black and blue after a game. And once in a while a slap shot directly to the mask would shatter it. The Dryden mask was fundamentally similar; while it provided more eye protection it still kept a lot of contact with the face.
On the other hand the helmet and cage separated the face protection from the face itself, the only major contact being at the chinstrap. It contained more padding to protect the head as well.
After refinements were made to the Dryden/Harrison design, notably the inclusion of more strategically-placed padding and a switch to kevlar and carbon fibre, it became more popular and was recognized as a very safe design.