The technological advancements that have redefined the pocketknife as we know it.

When I stumbled onto the knife scene in 1985, the only pocketknives I had carried up to that point were slipjoints and lockbacks. Of course, slipjoints weren’t called slipjoints back then but simply pocketknives. Today, as far as BLADE® is concerned—not that it’s any major newsflash or anything—any knife you can carry in your pocket is a pocketknife.

All of which brings me to the subject at hand: my picks of the five most important pocketknife developments of the modern sporting knife era. In rough chronological order they are:

•The pocket clip: BLADE Magazine Cutlery Hall-of-Fame® member Sal Glesser’s introduction in 1981 of the Spyderco pocketknives with the hole in the blade and the pocket clip would turn the genre on its head. While the hole in the blade was a masterstroke in and of itself, it was the pocket clip that forever changed the way people would carry their pocketknives. Rather than rattling around in the bottom of a pocket with change, car keys and what have you, the closed knife was held on the pocket lip by the clip, free from pocket-bottom scratches and poised at the ready to be deployed to cut whatever needed cutting.

•The linerlock: Cutlery Hall-of-Famer Michael Walker invented the linerlock in 1981, but it would take a few more years before custom knifemakers—and shortly thereafter, factory makers—began readily adopting the lock that made one-hand manual opening and closing of the pocketknife an easy reality rather than an exercise in hand contortions. Today, the argument can be made that the linerlock is used on more sporting folders than any other lock.

•The flipper: While exactly who made the first folder with the flipper tab that manually deploys a folding blade with the tap of a finger may be up for debate, there is no debating that the person who popularized it was Cutlery Hall-of-Fame knifemaker Kit Carson. A simple addition to the pocketknife on its face, the flipper tab opens a blade as fast and easy as any other manual method—probably faster.

•The Ikoma Korth Bearing System (IKBS): Pivot systems that helped open folding blades quickly and smoothly had been around before, but it was the IKBS conceived in 2002 that took blade opening to a new level of quick and smooth. In conjunction with the flipper especially, the IKBS transformed one-hand pocketknife opening from fast to just this side of automatic. Developed by Brazilian custom knifemakers Flavio Ikoma and Ricardo “Rick” and Paulo Lala (the latter two collectively known as Korth), the IKBS is another masterstroke of design and invention.

•Material upgrades: These cover a number of materials and years, from Walker’s switch to titanium for his linerlock spring in 1983, to a wide array of other hi-tech substances in subsequent years for pocketknife handles, including titanium, thermoplastics, Micarta®, G-10, carbon fiber and other state-of-the-art materials that not only were super strong and tough but also were lightweight, reducing the weight of pocketknives to the point that they were basically unnoticeable in a pocket. Meanwhile, the advances in blade steels over that same stretch are too many to mention.

How about you? What are the most important pocketknife developments? Tell us in the comments.

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