Do you think larger knives are so popular now in part due to pocket clips? I think they make carrying a big knife so comfortable that many people forget how little knife they actually need. Sometimes even the main blade on my Pioneer models is more than I need, which is why I love my Rancher with its little hawkbill.
No, the pocket clip was just one of the factors. What happened was a dying knife industry was desperate, and a decent idea was grabbed and run with. What really happened was a humongous shift in American society that changed whole markets and the way we live.
Once we had over a hundred big knife companies in the U.S. like Kinfolks, Pal, Western, Utica, Imperial, Robeson, Schrade-Walden, Camillus, and others. But the post WW2 era saw a giant migration from rural to urban life. All those GI's coming home from saving the world didn't go back to the family farm or small town Mayberry RFD. An unprecedented number of young men who were trained by the armed forces in everything from Aircraft maintenance to welding to electricians to construction to medics all were not about to go back to milking the cows or getting the soy beans in from the back 40. They got jobs in the city and went for a more affluent life than they ever imagined before the war. This was the most massive migration of people in history. It gave rise to the whole new phenomenon of the tract home. Suburbia. Then there was the GI loans and GI bill's for home loans at low interest and schools for the returning GI's, sailors, and Marines. More people went to work in offices and wore suits than before. The need for much of a pocketknife shrunk massively. From 1945 to 1965, the face of the American landscape radically changed.
By the 1980's the dawn of the computer age was on the horizon and the office cubicle became more the norm than getting those soy beans in from the back 40. Even the blue collar jobs were mostly in the city. Delivery truck drivers, gas station mechanics, contraction workers, appliance repair, dry cleaning plant workers and managers, warehouse workers. The American dream of a the little house wth the white picket fence and new car in the driveway became real. Not much knife was needed for the new life in modern post war suburbia. By the 1980's pocket knife sales were down like the market had fallen off a cliff, and in a way it had. Are from hunting and fishing, and some camping, the majority of people didn't even bother to carry a knife anymore. Most of the big American knife companies were gone by this time, and the few left were staggering on the ropes.
Then a young guy named Sal Glesser had an idea. He combined the pocket clip with a hole in the blade and it created a sensation. The onehand thumb open knife was born, and like most new things it took off. By the 1990's other companies had jumped on the bandwagon and had one hand locking blade knives on the market. It was like the birth of pre sliced bread. In ten years, Schrade, Camillus and the others were gone, names sole off to Chinese companies. Of all the old knife companies, Victorinox survived only by being a nitch the others couldn't fill; the multitool.
By a lot of P.R. and hype, these new companies convinced the new generation of knife buyers that they were goners if they didn't have the latest greatest one hand opening knife with the latest super steel. And the elephant in the room is, a hell of a lot of the appeal of the new age "tacticool" knife is as a weapon. As I've seen it in print in the general forum many times the "in case someone gets on me" syndrome. You have knife manufactures pushing knives by showing them stuck through car doors, or advertised as being able to "De-animate enemy sentries" and other such idiocy. The modern knife market is for very impressionable young men who watch too much Rambo movies.
