Has the best knife already been created?

Asking “has the best knife been made” is like asking if the best car has been made, or the best refrigerator… or anything else. Materials and design are constantly changing, with the average being an improvement.

Sure, there are people today who still carry a Buck 110… and in 50 years there will still be people carrying a sebenza… but steel is always improving, tolerances get tighter, better materials for scales are going to be developed, and who knows? Maybe “knives” won’t be made of steel at all… maybe they’ll be some sort of molded resin with an integrated laser, or maybe we will discover a material in a mine on Mars that makes steel better. We were using sharp rocks to cut things 200,000 years ago. Who knows what’s in store for knives.
 
It's a miserable dragon to chase, if you choose to. If we come to the conclusion that the "best" of something has been made, then one of two things happen:

We might wrap our lives/existence around it to some degree, secure in "knowing" that it is the be all/end all. Kinda depressing if you really think about it. No ingenuity left to put into something. Can you think of a single thing that we have really gotten to that point with?

Or we completely abandon it. Once the pinnacle of any technology is reached/exhausted, we as clever violent selfish apes start looking for the next angle. It's why we went from smashing each other with sharpish rocks, to slicing each other open with bronze, to coming up with ways to make iron bash/cut through bronze, to industrializing ourselves over the next couple thousand years to come up with more and more and more advanced tools. At the end of the day, we have just come up with fancier rocks.

My personal thought: a quantifiable list of "best" materials might currently exist but may not have been actualized into a single tool...yet. Even if that happens, "best" is generally considered a qualifiable metric. I personally think that as long as something needs to be severed, we as a species will never agree on what is "best". Knife Knuts like us may come up with a list. However a person living in 2342 might be totally fine using the left over sharp edge of a polymer "tin" to make a mundane cut because what passes as a knife is 20' away.

Anything that is going to square those extremes up is going to take a paradigm shift in how we do things: cutting things with telekinesis or pocket nanobots, etc and will be so ingrained in society we won't give it two thoughts.
 
I can remember back in the late 90's when I thought the Sebenza was the holy grail of knives and if I just had one, women would throw themselves at me, men would want to be me, and ...well, you get it.

Then my wife bought me one for my birthday in 1998 and it wasn't even a speed bump in slowing down the addiction. Production knives, custom knives, back to production knives...

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
 
allenC said:
No way! We can't even agree on what the best blade length is!
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That s why I carry this on my fishing trips , so I have that BEST knife ;)
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Has the perfect folder been created yet? No. As soon as you put a hinge in it, you introduce new ways for a knife to fail. Every time you put another part in it, such as a lock, a stop pin, or whatever, you introduce even more potential failure points, and sometimes combinations of possibilities. The perfect knife will be a fixed blade, one that is unbreakable, and never needs sharpened.

Truthfully, as long as you are just using it as a knife, a tool for cutting stuff, whatever is the most effective knife you have at cutting the stuff that you need cut, is probably just about perfect.
 
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The ULU has been around for over 5,000 years. I'd wager a guess that a lot of indigenous folks over the centuries thought it is/was the "best" knife for peeling whale, musk ox, seal/walrus, and other game, as well as chopping and dicing veggies and spices.
The scalpel is the perfect knife doing an operation, but not so much for an amputation.
A Spey blade is "perfect" for its intended purpose, and can also be used for budding/grafting, and peeling a critter. However, it isn't necessarily "best" at those tasks. A cleaver is "perfect" or "ideal" for its intended purpose, but pretty much in the way, cleaning/fileting a bluegill/sunfish or bass/walleye, or even cutting the tag end off after tying on a hook/lure, or fly ... especially an ant or gnat size fly ...

Yes. The "perfect" or "ideal" knife ... or rather blade profile ... has been invented.
That said, no one blade profile is ideal for every potential task. For example, someone making a feather quill pen would find any thick spined long blade a detriment. A sharp thin short blade with a strong tip and little to no belly, like an Ex-Acto or like hobby/modeling knife actually works best for that task.

"Best" is based on the task at hand, and the taste/opinion of the person performing the task, so yes, there are differences of opinion amongst deer hunters, for instance, of what knife is best for field dressing, skinning, and butchering a whit tail.
 
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There be a point where metallurgy, technology and labor combine to get a near best. Technically what’s possible will almost always advance. Question becomes at what cost? There will always be a fringe group willing to pay. Anyone want at $100,000 folder? Someone will be making one at some point.
 
Steely_Gunz said:
We might wrap our lives/existence around it to some degree, secure in "knowing" that it is the be all/end all. Kinda depressing if you really think about it. No ingenuity left to put into something. Can you think of a single thing that we have really gotten to that point with?
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Well - maybe one single thing…

The pony car reached its final form in 2013 imho. There are faster and “better” Mustangs, but for me, this is the be all/end all pony car. :)

And with the move to electrification and automatics, I suspect it might not come around again.

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Perfect knife still doesn’t exist. ;)
 
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