The cost of a new pocket knife (then and now)

Yeah, but this is my first born, the age old inheritor of the tittle. The bearer of the standard. Oh well, my other two are knife carriers, as are my grandkids. :D

Carl.
 
There's still time for redemption. At least he's not trying to open packages with his keys.

- Christian
 
I have problems with all this stuff about how life was slower paced way back when.

I remember my mother’s first washing machine. It was a tub on legs with an agitator in the middle. You filled it with a hose from the soapstone sink and added soap and clothes. Let the machine work its magic. Opened a cock at the bottom and the water flowed down a short hose to a floor drain. Refilled the machine with hot water, agitate to rinse the soap out. Drain again. Pull the sopping laundry into one tub of the sink. A hand wringer was mounted between the two tanks of the sink. You turned the crank as you fed clothing from one tub to the next. Then you carried the wet laundry to hang it on lines to dry. Outside in good weather. In the basement with during bad.

Anyone from recent generations would be appalled by this Rube Goldberg arrangement. Not back then. It was a wonderful time saver. There used to be something called Laundry Day. One a week the women of a household spent the whole day doing laundry. Heating water on the stove. Washing by hand on a scrubbing board. Wringing each garment out by hand. Hanging the laundry to dry, collecting the dry clothing, ironing it, folding it, putting it away.

That’s just one example. Remember the song Yankee Doodle?

Fath'r and I went down to camp,
Along with Captain Gooding,
And there we saw the men and boys
As thick as hasty pudding.

Hasty pudding was the fast food of that day. Hanging in the fireplace it only took six hours to cook. By 1897, when the well off had in-house ovens, the Fanny Farmer cookbook said hasty pudding could be made in two and a half hours. Not that the housewife spent that whole time working on it. But she had to be there, stoking the fire in the oven, doing the many other necessary things. “A man may work from sun to sun. But a woman’s work is never done.”

On an nineteenth century construction site there were no power saws. Every cut had to be made by hand. In lieu of forklifts men carried timbers and hods on their shoulders. A lot of excavation was done by horses pulling scrapers. Lifting stuff involved a block and tackle. A forty hour work week was a union man’s pipe dream. They meant that saying about men working sun to sun.

Yes, in some sense life used to be slower paced. But that was a very mixed bag.
 
There were lots of power tools in the 18th and 19th century. Sheesh. How about the Overshot Waterwheel? These used to power machinery for a whole factory. Using a water wheel with a system of drive shafts and gear boxes all types of saws,grinders and other machinery was powered. That's how most of the early knife factories were powered. And then came the steam jenny.Mid 1800's. "Steam Jenny" is short for "steam generator". These powered a wide array of not only power tools, but lifting and loading devices.
 
rma100 said:
There were lots of power tools in the 18th and 19th century. Sheesh. How about the Overshot Waterwheel? These used to power machinery for a whole factory. Using a water wheel with a system of drive shafts and gear boxes all types of saws,grinders and other machinery was powered. That's how most of the early knife factories were powered. And then came the steam jenny.Mid 1800's. "Steam Jenny" is short for "steam generator". These powered a wide array of not only power tools, but lifting and loading devices.
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Of course there were. The nineteenth century was the age of the industrial revolution. But most of those power tools were big. Fixed in factories where steam power was most effective. Lumber wasn’t milled in saw pits by top sawyers and bottom sawyers. It was cut into beams and scantlings by steam powered saws, then shipped to a building site. If a project was big enough it made sense to set up powered saws right on the job. On big jobs things like steam shovels made financial sense. Small builders on small jobs couldn’t afford such things. The same is true of powered cranes. The hand held circular saw didn’t exist. Grab your hand saw. Neither did the hand held drill motor. Reach for your brace and bit. Grab for your chain saw and you’d come up with a misery whip. Hand held nail guns only appeared within my lifetime.
 
Raymond1000 said:
Of course there were. The nineteenth century was the age of the industrial revolution. But most of those power tools were big. Fixed in factories where steam power was most effective. Lumber wasn’t milled in saw pits by top sawyers and bottom sawyers. It was cut into beams and scantlings by steam powered saws, then shipped to a building site. If a project was big enough it made sense to set up powered saws right on the job. On big jobs things like steam shovels made financial sense. Small builders on small jobs couldn’t afford such things. The same is true of powered cranes. The hand held circular saw didn’t exist. Grab your hand saw. Neither did the hand held drill motor. Reach for your brace and bit. Grab for your chain saw and you’d come up with a misery whip. Hand held nail guns only appeared within my lifetime.
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I guess I just don't understand what the availability of a circular saw has to do with the cost of a pocket knife then and now. I believe that was the OP.
 
rma100 said:
I guess I just don't understand what the availability of a circular saw has to do with the cost of a pocket knife then and now. I believe that was the OP.
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No more than doing laundry does. Except as background information about the slow pace of life in the old days.
 
Ray, I hear you. My grand dad used horses and mules to work their 80 acres until the mid thirties, house used wood for heat and cooking, and when he wasn't farming he was a carpenter. He didn't own a skilsaw, and all nails and screws were driven by hand. I still have his old bit and brace, yankee screwdrivers, etc. Folks worked, and worked long and hard, even in factories. Much of what is automated now was done with muscle. So, folks didn't go racing around for what would have been considered trivial things or whatnot, but they sure went racing around when working ~ whether at home or work. If you didn't hustle you either got let go or your pop gave you the switch.
 
Raymond brings up some interesting point, IMO... life may have been "slower," since people were less bombarded by consumerism and advertising, constantly having to make choices about minute facets of life, traveling miles and miles every day, rushing from one activity to the next and engaging in maybe 5 or 6 different social settings in one day... but that certainly doesn't mean it was easier.
 
stevomiller said:
Ray, I hear you. My grand dad used horses and mules to work their 80 acres until the mid thirties, house used wood for heat and cooking, and when he wasn't farming he was a carpenter. He didn't own a skilsaw, and all nails and screws were driven by hand. I still have his old bit and brace, yankee screwdrivers, etc. Folks worked, and worked long and hard, even in factories. Much of what is automated now was done with muscle. So, folks didn't go racing around for what would have been considered trivial things or whatnot, but they sure went racing around when working ~ whether at home or work. If you didn't hustle you either got let go or your pop gave you the switch.
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I’m at least a fourth generation carpenter. Probably more. Farm boys found carpentry familiar work. It’s just that four generations is as far back as I can trace it.

Yeah, I’ve called them skillsaws all my life. Then I went into a hardware store and told the clerk, “I’m looking for a skillsaw.” He told me, “I can’t help you. Will you settle for Black and Decker?” Since then I haven’t been sure that people outside the trades knew what skillsaw meant.
 
Unless you lived in a large city, you were pretty much stuck with whatever was at your local store or maybe was in the Sears catalog. That being said, most people had less of everything. Unless you were wealthy you had one watch, pen, knife and a Sunday go to meeting suit. I doubt that most men had more then two pairs of shoes if they were lucky. It was a different time.
 
godot said:
... That being said, most people had less of everything. Unless you were wealthy you had one watch, pen, knife and a Sunday go to meeting suit. I doubt that most men had more then two pairs of shoes if they were lucky.....
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This is a great point and something I try to remember in my own life. My grandfolks were young'ens during the depression and I can well remember a different outlook on "stuff" from them. I came up during the coal industry collapse in southern WV. To say such things shape your thinking is a major understatement. I will probably always have an inner voice urging restraint and caution regarding debt and acquiring material possessions.

Kind of hard to square that with knife collecting. But as I've humbly admitted I am terrible at it. I buy a few nice ones time from time to time but not compulsively. It's just something nice to pass on when I get to that point. The ones I value the most are the ones I've carried and they are few in number but large in memories. Maybe that is the reason I love my pocket knives so much, they carry so many memories for me.

I can't speak for generations past but maybe having only one or two knives made them value the ones they had more. Even if the actual cost was similar in hours to pay for them.

Will
 
Godot's point is important. Paradoxically, Traditional knife interest is probably kept alive by the Internet. I certainly couldn't get access to even a tenth of my knife collection without it, I communicate instantly to other Traditional enthusiasts, we are very small in number but now able to share our interests. Whatever the era or society, the wealthy have always had it easy, that never changes. The cost of a decent knife is probably the same as it was a century ago, very well made knives with costlier handles have never been cheap and I'm sure some people back then would've been disapproving of a some people spending a day's money on a knife!

As for time/pace of life it's relative. Yes people had to do manual labour. They may have died earlier from injury,infections etc but we now do little physical work and begin to suffer premature health problems unheard of two generations ago. Today the farmer behind my country place came to plough his large field. It took him maybe two hours, he returned later on to do some more harrowing. I just wonder how many men and how many horses that would've taken and the time! But now of course we are always at somebody's beck&call with texting, e-mail, social media instant this&that. One reason why so many people have insomnia maybe? That's why I say time is relative. The cost of pocket knives is about the same as it was I reckon, but the type of time we have to enjoy or still less use them is different.

Regards, Will
 
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