How the Swiss Put an Essential Item on Your Camping Gear List. - By: Bruno Blackstone

Whilst, in the middle of your next camping experience, you reach for your versatile pen-knife or multi-tool, take a minute to remember the journey it made to turn out to be an important item on your camping gear list.

In the 1880s the Swiss Armed service needed a dual purpose tool that could be given to all artillery men. It needed to include a blade (a must for all servicemen) along with a screwdriver, a requirement for assembly of the standard issue rifle of that era. No factory in Switzerland had the ability to tackle the order therefore a German supplier handled the production of the very first fifteen thousand delivered in 1891.

Unhappy that manufacture was taking place in Germany a Swiss manufacturer, Karl Elsener, started the method to Switzerland following this 1st operation. Throughout the 1890s changes happened including adding tools on each sides of the knife by making use of the very same spring mechanism for each side. This meant twice as many features can be incorporated into each knife. The famous Victorinox brand name still in use was developed when Elsener combined his late mother’s name Victoria with ‘inox’ that means Stainless Steel.

Additionally within the 1890s yet another Swiss organization known as Wenger started out the production of a similar gadget. In 1908 in the expectation of causing competition and perhaps lower prices the Swiss Army gave half of the business to each factory. To the current day Wenger promotes itself as ‘the genuine Swiss Army knife’ and Victorinox as ‘the original Swiss Army knife’ by common agreement. The title ‘Swiss Army knife’ was only started at the close of WW2 when American soldiers going home from Europe purchased the knives in their thousands. Struggling with the German for The Officer’s and Sports Knife, the brand by which it ended up being patented, they decided to call it by the title many of us know these days and it has become synonymous with these multi-bladed and tooled utility knives.

Although Wenger has now been purchased by Victorinox the two brand names have been kept in existence with brand new and innovative features being included over the generations. A threat to this single Swiss production occurred in 2008 when the Swiss Armed Forces had to open the contract to the rest of the world under international trading regulations. 7 suppliers in all bid by offering up a model that then was subject to a number of tests. Victorinox finally came through the tests as winner and won the work for 75,000 knives plus cases.

A number of types now exist with a variety of different tools and uses geared to every potential activity from the short camping trip to the experience of a lifetime roughing it in every sense of the term. The Wenger ‘Giant’ is made up from every device the company ever developed, with eighty seven blades and 141 distinct functions it's the globe’s most multi-functional knife. If you would like one of these for your camping break it will involve about £550 and would possibly require its own backpack and tent! A one-off knife with 314 different blades and tools, it weighs 11lbs and is famous as the world’s biggest – not advised for spontaneous travel.

And so that is a condensed account of the Swiss Army Knife and how it got its name. All that and not 1 mention of the tool to take objects out of horse’s hooves! Maybe that is just a myth after all.

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