ILLUSTRATION: DAWN COOPER
NOT ON YOUR KNIFE
Everyone’s favourite multi-use tool, the Swiss Army Knife, could actually claim to be German. In the late 1880s, the Swiss Army commissioned a folding penknife for its troops, but no homeland manufacturer could handle a 15,000-unit order, so they had to be made across the border in the German town of Solingen, known as the ‘city of blades’.