Did the Swiss army really use the Swiss army knife?
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But of course. I know this because I heard it from one Tanya, a Swiss citizen living in the U.S. whose father served in the Swiss army. Tanya confirms that her dad was issued a regulation Swiss army knife not unlike the ones we civilians are familiar with. I was going to ask Tanya for more details, but unfortunately I lost her phone number, one of the hazards you face in this business when you start doing research via talk radio rather than the library. But I’m confident Tanya would have told me that the main difference between her father’s knife and, say, Mrs. Adams’s was that the handle was anodized aluminum rather than red plastic. (Red is supposed to make the knife easier to find when dropped in the snow, a mishap to which military personnel are apparently immune.) I am also certain she would have told me the knife was furnished with the standard soldierly assortment of tools, consisting of a thick stainless steel blade, two screwdrivers, a can opener, and an awl. That is, unless her father was an officer, in which case his knife might have included a corkscrew. The privileges of rank.
The modern Swiss army knife dates back to 1891, when Victorinox founder Karl Elsener began supplying the Swiss army with knives made in Switzerland, previous army blades having been manufactured in Germany. The original wooden-handled knife featured a blade, a screwdriver, a can opener, and a punch, but Elsener didn’t really hit his stride until 1897, when he invented an officer’s version that used a special spring mechanism to enable more utensils to be added without increasing the size of the handle. In 1908 the Swiss army decided to split the contract, with half the order going to Victorinox, in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, and the other half to a firm run by rival cutlery maker Theodore Wenger, headquartered in a canton where everybody spoke French. They claim they did this in the interest of national harmony, but they may have also figured a little competition would keep the price down. If so, they were right. Today you can get a Swiss army knife for as little as nine bucks.
