If there is a knife that is immediately recognizable to the general public, it is the Swiss Army Knife. I mean, if you hold one up, the red handles and the corkscrew give it away.

As a boy, I was captivated by the Swiss Army Knife, which promised to solve any problem from picking splinters to emergency field amputation. Now, I did not actually know anyone that had a Swiss Army knife, but that did not slow me down, because I watched that most 80’s of TV shows, MacGyver. In case you don’t remember, the mullet wearing, world saving, duct-tape using protagonist saved the world on a weekly basis, often with little more than duct tape and his trusty swiss army knife.

The Swiss Army does actually use the knife, with two companies, Wegner and Victorinox each supplying 25,000 knives each annually. Ironically, that only amounts to about one days production for each company, with the rest being almost all sold outside of Switzerland, with the USA being the primary importer (lots of us MacGyver fans out there, I guess).

The actual knife by used by the Swiss Army looks much like the production models available in the store, except they have aluminum handles. Ironically, the explanation for the red plastic handles has always been that the red was highly visible when dropped in the snow. Maybe Swiss Army soldiers don’t drop theirs in the snow.

If you are the sort of person who actually uses a knife for a tool, then the Swiss Army Knife might just be for you. It is certainly more economical than some alternatives, with the more stripped down models beginning around $12.