Why the U.S. Military Rejected This Tool, Then Copied It

In 1975, a broke young engineer sat in a Tehran hotel room with a $300 Fiat falling apart outside and sketched a tool that every knife company, every tool company, the phone company, and the United States military would go on to reject. He spent eight years in a garage being told no. Forty years later, the Army came back to his company to help design a combat version of the very tool it had dismissed, and soldiers now buy it with their own money. This is the story of the Leatherman multi-tool, and of the single design decision that made it impossible to kill. Not the patent, which expired. Not the lawsuits, which the company lost. One quiet inversion made on hotel paper in 1975, the choice to build the whole tool around a full pair of pliers instead of a blade, and the Portland factory that no copycat could ever counterfeit. We follow the design from Cabela's first order of 500 units, through the day a federal court ruled that anyone was legally allowed to copy it, through the airport ban that should have ended it, through the flood of cheap clones, all the way to the battlefield. We tell the honest version too, the flaws every long-time owner knows, the two separate defeats in court, the parts that were never American. If you have one in a drawer, a tackle box, or clipped to a belt in the garage, this is why it still works. #leatherman #multitool #edc #madeinusa #everydaycarry #toolsofthetrade #americanmade #leathermanufacturing #pockettools #militarygear