Every knife in the program has a number. Knife #1 belongs to the founder. It started in Paris. Register yours and add it to the map. Move it when you travel. The route is the story.
Want to register your knife? Email to join the program →
Karl Elsener opened a cutlery workshop in Ibach, Canton Schwyz, in 1884. The Swiss Army had a problem: the regulation soldier's knife was being manufactured in Germany. Elsener set out to make it at home. In 1891 he delivered the first Swiss-made soldier's knife to the Swiss Army. It had a blade, a screwdriver, a can opener, and a punch. It was functional and nothing more.
In 1897 Elsener filed a patent for a new version — the Officer's and Sports Knife. It had a second blade and a corkscrew, and it was light enough that officers would actually carry it. His mother Victoria had died the year before. In 1909 he named the company after her. When stainless steel — inox in French — became available in the 1920s, he combined the two words: Victoria plus inox. Victorinox.
The knife is now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It has been on the Space Shuttle. It is the most-gifted object at Swiss diplomatic functions. Nearly every person who travels with a pocket knife carries one. The design has not changed in any fundamental way since 1897. When something is already solved, you do not redesign it.
The knife in this program is The Waiter — Victorinox's beverage-friendly model, under $25. Cap lifter. Can opener. Corkscrew. Small blade. Toothpick. The right knife for a picnic, a hotel room, a long train ride. It fits in a pocket without thinking about it. It costs less than a round of drinks at the kind of bar where you'd want a corkscrew. That is the point. It is disposable in price and irreplaceable in usefulness.
There is one problem. TSA. The knife that survived two world wars, the Space Shuttle, and a century of travel cannot make it through a domestic security checkpoint in a carry-on bag. The solution — arrived at after losing enough of them at the bin — is to stop trying. Buy one. Carry it through the trip. Leave it at the hotel when you fly out. Let the next person find it. This site is building a program around exactly that: a network of travelers who buy, carry, and pass forward. A knife that keeps moving. More details coming.