You remember those pre 9/11 days, right? At my local airport the station manager for Horizon Airlines would just wave me through security. He knew me and I knew him. In the days after 9/11 that all changed, with a uniformed policeman at the security checkpoint amid very serious-looking faces. That’s when my Leatherman tool stopped traveling with me. It, plus needles and anything else even remotely sharp suddenly became things that you simply didn’t travel with.
I could have done with a Leatherman or Swiss Army Knife in the UK a couple of months ago. At a hotel in the north of England the shaver outlet in the bathroom (transformer powered for safety under British wiring regulations) didn’t work. I had the choice, at 7:30 in the morning, of going down to reception and getting a razor, changing rooms just to shave, or, as a nice technical challenge, of rigging up a 13 A ring main socket to the US twin bladed plug on my razor. It was not that easy on a live outlet with just my house key and fob, but I returned everything to a safe condition after finishing with the hair on my face.
Why is Leatherman called Leatherman? You might think that it was something to do with a specialized tool originally put together for people who wanted to work with leather: boring holes, trimming, and finishing off leather rivets? That would be incorrect. The iconic Portland company is named after Tim Leatherman who started the company about twenty-five years ago. The factory is well worth a visit, although, unless things have changed, tours are limited to just ten people only one day of the week.
The Messenfabrik where the Swiss Army Knife (more correctly the Swiss Officer’s Knife) is manufactured (now for one hundred and twenty-five years, making the Leatherman seem in its infancy) is also well worth a visit, although the trip is not as easy to arrange. The original factory was on the banks of a stream known as the Tobelbach in the village of Ibach, about four miles Northeast of Lac Luzern, and the innovative machinery for grinding and polishing was driven by a watermill in the stream.
Ibach is in the Canton of Schwyz, whose pronunciation and the derived name Schweiz, close to the modern “Swiss,” are not accidental because the modern day Switzerland, its flag, and its charter, originated from the Canton in 1291. The Museum of the Swiss Charters of Confederation in the nearby community of Schwyz is also worth a visit to see the complete history of the country laid out in one place (be prepared for a lot of steps up to the museum!)
The founder of the Swiss Army Knife business was a cutler named Karl Elsener who, in 1884, settled in Ibach-Schwyz to make knives. At the time the area was very impoverished and unemployment was astronomical. It took until 1891 for the business to be profitable when Elsener won a contract to supply knives to the Swiss army and the business was renamed in 1909 after his late mother, Victoria. When stainless steel was invented (inox for short, after the French inoxydable) the company adopted its present name of Victorinox in 1921. Ten years later the great Brown-Boveri corporation set up the world’s first electric steel hardening plant for Victorinox.
Since then the company has expanded into timepieces (kind of logical for a Swiss company), travel gear, fashions, and, unfortunately, fragrances (Swiss Army fragrance sounds like a total oxymoron). But most of us would prefer to ogle over one of the many versions of the versatile knives – from a handy accessory for serving your caviar at picnics, to removing stones from horses’ hooves, to live-saving combinations for the cyclist or rambler.
Now Victorinox has broken into the twenty-first century with the Secure knife. Apart from the more normal expectations of blade, nail file, screwdrivers, scissors and key ring the Secure also features a removable USB drive in 8 Gbyte, 16 Gbyte, and 32 Gbyte versions. The drive is password protected, or you can use fingerprint recognition. Victorinox claims that the drive is totally unhackable: what an open-ended challenge…
The Secure also adds an LED flashlight.
Would you prefer to carry either a Leatherman or Victorinox tool with you? With the tribulation I have received over packing just a three-quarters empty bottle of shampoo I would carry neither: there must be a lot of loot recovered every day from the trashcans at airport security checkpoints and I’m not about to give them anything else to crow over.
