The Patent That Started Everything
In 1892, George Schrade — a German immigrant working as a toolmaker in New York City — filed a patent for a knife with a blade that opened automatically when a button on the handle was pressed. He was not the first person to build a spring-loaded knife. European craftsmen had been making them for centuries. But Schrade was the first person to design one that could be manufactured at industrial scale using American mass-production methods.
The result was the Schrade Presto — a side-opening automatic knife with a push-button release and a robust locking mechanism. It was compact, reliable, and affordable. Where Italian switchblades were handmade by individual craftsmen — each one slightly different from the last — the Presto rolled off a production line. Identical. Consistent. Available by the case.
Building the Company
George Schrade founded the Schrade Cutlery Company in 1904 in Walden, New York. The company produced the Presto alongside a growing line of pocket knives, and it grew steadily through the early twentieth century. The Presto became a standard pocket knife for working Americans — farmers, mechanics, tradespeople, anyone who needed a blade they could open fast with one hand.
By the 1920s, Schrade was one of the largest knife manufacturers in the United States. The company had moved through several reorganizations — George Schrade sold his interests and started new ventures multiple times, with the restless energy of a man who was more interested in building things than managing them. At one point he held over fifty patents related to knife mechanisms and manufacturing processes.
His designs were not just about the knife. He patented the machinery to make the knife — the presses, the grinding jigs, the spring-assembly fixtures. He was not just a knifemaker. He was an industrialist who happened to work in blades.
The Irony
George Schrade died in 1940 — eighteen years before the federal government banned the product he invented. The Switchblade Knife Act of 1958 effectively killed commercial production of the Presto and every other American-made switchblade. The company that bore his name survived by pivoting to manual folding knives, but the product that made George Schrade famous became illegal to sell across state lines.
There is a particular cruelty in that timeline. A German immigrant comes to America, invents a product, builds an industry, employs thousands of people, and dies. Then the government bans his invention based on tabloid headlines about teenagers in leather jackets. The man who built the American switchblade industry never knew it would be dismantled by the country he built it in.
The Legacy Lives On
Today, the automatic knife industry that George Schrade created is thriving again. More than 40 states have legalized switchblades and OTF knives. Texas led the way with HB 1935 in 2017. Modern automatic knives — both side-opening switchblades and out-the-front designs — owe their existence to the engineering principles Schrade pioneered in a New York machine shop over a hundred years ago.
The Presto is a collector's item now. Original examples sell for hundreds of dollars. But the mechanism it introduced — a spring-loaded blade released by a push button — remains the foundation of every automatic knife sold today. Including every one in our catalog.