If anyone has known how to take advantage of a Swiss Army Knife, it has been none other than the character from the television series MacGyver . With this little tool and a lot of imagination, the writers of the series turned their protagonist into an accomplished engineer, a master electrician, a skilled locksmith, a professional mechanic and the most prolific inventor of gadgets. Really, a Swiss Army Knife is nothing more than an all-purpose pocket knife. So why do we call it a Swiss Army Knife? Well, for a matter of national pride.
Karl Elsener
A Swiss patriot like Karl Elsener, manufacturer of surgical material, who did not take well that the knives of the Swiss Army were of German manufacture and decided to remedy it. He founded the Swiss Association of Knife Makers and spent time and money making a smaller knife to which he added other tools such as a can opener, a second blunt blade as a screwdriver, and a corkscrew, all contained in the hinged handle. In 1896 he became the official supplier of knives to the Swiss Army. Elsener thought that the success of his knife was to convert it into multipurpose, and it is not that it was not so, but the archaeologists, those professionals who shake the absolute truths with their discoveries and discoveries, have shown that good old Karl had not been the first to manufacture this type of knives. And this time it wasn't the Chinese, it was the Romans.
In the Fitzwilliam Museum of the University of Cambridge, a multipurpose knife dated around the third century is exhibited a little over 15 cm which, in addition to the knife itself (broken and rusty as it is made of iron), also has a spoon, fork, punch, spatula and a nut opener or useful for eating crustaceans? The fact is that this tool should not have been part of the legionnaires' campaign equipment because it is made of silver, rather it seems to belong to some rich merchant who traveled selling his products or some high-ranking military man who traveled the world conquering new territories for the Empire.