The Family Empire Behind the Most Recognized Pocket Knife in the World

In Nineteen Forty-Five, American soldiers across liberated Europe bought a small red Swiss folding knife they could not name because they could not pronounce the German word for it. They called it the Swiss Army Knife. That name spread to One Hundred and Twenty Countries, went to space with NASA, appeared in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and became a universal metaphor for versatility itself. Karl Elsener, the Swiss cutler who invented it, had been dead for Twenty-Seven years. He never knew any of it happened. His family still runs the same factory in the same Swiss village where he opened his first workshop in Eighteen Eighty-Four.