Logan/Smyth and the Mystery of the Ring Knife
It all started when a friend of mine gave me a curious little knife he found at a flea market. Shaped like a ring, it was, he was told, a “paperboy knife,” used decades ago by newspapermen to cut the twine on bales of newspapers. A little searching on eBay revealed that knives of this type are also called “postal knives.” The application seemed obvious enough. While wearing this knife on your finger, you could easily use it for packaging and cutting cord and string, yet there would be little danger of injury to the wearer.
My sample bore a clue to its origin: the words “Logan Smyth” and the number “6.” The 6 I could interpret easily enough; the ring was roughly that size and just barely fit my pinky. “Logan Smyth” I took to be the manufacturer… but who was Logal Smyth, and were they still in business? How old was my knife likely to be?
A query at the knife enthusiast bulletin board Bladeforums proved very interesting. No one could tell me much about Logan Smyth, but several participants identified my blade as a Handy Twine Knife. One collector even had a box of very old Handy Twine Knives, complete with documentation, and this included instructions for using the blades.
The Handy Twine Knife Company of Sandusky, Ohio, it turns out, has been in business for more than a hundred years. They have manufactured nothing but ring knives during all that time. “Our utility knives lead the industry,” their website asserts. “This ring-type knife can be used to cut twine, ribbon, plastic strapping, pallet wrap, tape, cardboard, even light gauge wire!” The company claims its little knives can even increase productivity while reducing “the risk of repetitive motion injuries.” The ring band is aluminum, while the blade is heat-treated steel held in place with nickel-plated brass rivets. The Handy Twine Knife Company also offers knives with polycarbonate plastic rings and offers an FDA-approved model for use in food processing (such as meat packing).
Photo courtesy of Roland Procter.
According to the company’s history page, the knife was invented by a postal worker named James R. Caldwell in the late 1800s. Frustrated at his inability to “keep track of” his pocket knife while sorting mail for transportation by rail, he attached the blade of his knife to a copper band bent around his finger. (The Handy Twine Knife Company says this original knife is now on display at the Smithsonian Postal Museum.)
Caldwell is said to have founded Handy Twine shortly thereafter, to have recorded his first sale in 1904, and to have filed for a patent in 1910 (which was approved in 1912). But this begged the question: Where did “Logan Smyth” fit? The company was known to have manufactured, under contract to the US Government, some quantity of automatic MC-1 aircrew survival knives. Was Logan Smyth a subcontractor to the Handy Twine Knife Company?
I spoke with Eric Oldham, Handy Twine’s national sales manager. He was not familiar with Logan Smyth, but he verified that the knife in question was not made by his company — nor did Handy Twine label their ring knives the way my sample was badged, with the size number inside the text of the company name, arranged in a circular pattern.
To know more, I had to find someone who could tell me about Logan Smyth. Steven K. Dick of Tactical Knives magazine mentioned the company in his article on the MC-1. “…At various times,” he wrote, “the MC-1 was made on contract by Schrade Walden, Camillus Cutlery, and a mysterious company called “Logan/Smyth” that no one seems to know anything about. Schrade went under several years ago; Logan/Smyth seems to have disappeared right after their contract was completed…”
A call to Information for Venice, California (Logan/Smyth’s last known place of operation) yielded no listings for a company by that name in Venice or the surrounding area.
I then tried LinkedIn, the business networking website. There I found Michael Furey, who listed among his past positions President of Logan/Smyth Manufacturing. I managed to track him down through the phone tree for his current business, and was pleasantly surprised to find him very forthcoming once I explained what it was that I wanted.
Mr. Furey explained that his grandfather and a business partner owned the Bates File Manufacturing Company, one of the largest makers of manicure implements in the world. At one time, Bates File made over 175 different nail care products. The company also manufactured, for the United States Government, ring knives like my Logan Smyth sample.
Mr. Furey’s father was with Bates File until 1981 and was responsible for the tooling for the ring knives. It was in 1981 that he, with his son Michael, started Logan/Smyth manufacturing. “We took the ring knife contract away from Bates,” Michael Furey explained, “and kept it away from Bates because they couldn’t deliver the product in a timely fashion. We bid the contract to the General Services Administration in 1982 and held it until we closed in 2005.” While the Handy Twine Knife Company was making similar knives during this period, according to Mr. Furey, “the primary customer and the largest purchase of ring knives on the planet was the U.S. government.”
Of the Handy Twine Knife Company, Michael Furey said, “Handy Twine is a good company that makes a multitude of different knives. …I believe they primarily sold their ring knives to the newspaper industry for binding newspaper bundles.”
At the height of its production, Furey explained, Logan/Smyth Manufacturing “shipped 125,000 to 150,000 knives a month in five different sizes to the government. Size 6 was the smallest, while sizes 8, 9, 10, and 12 were the largest. The tens went to the military for the military postal service.” Logan/Smyth also made insulated drinkware, a myriad of nail care implements, and specialty items. None of its contributions to the knife industry are as well known as the MC-1 aircrew survival knife, however — nor has the association been free if controversy, however mild.
There has been a great deal of speculation online that Logan/Smyth lost the government contract to produce the MC-1, and that this may have contributed to the company’s demise. Neither assertion is true, according to Michael Furey. He disputes the claim that Logan/Smyth experienced quality issues in producing the MC-1.
“During our initial production run of the MC-1,” he said, “one order of 1600 knives came back. We had purchased a new grinding machine and, for the first run of the knives, we didn’t have the proper wheels in place, so we had a buffeting problem. We took those back and replaced them, but other than that, there were no problems. We built 17 major tools and 30 support tools in 60 days when we got the contract, and were shipping product in 90 days.”
What, then, ended Logan/Smyth’s association with the MC-1? “The MC-1 contract was terminated at the convenience of the government,” Furey told me. “It was the end of the Reagan era, and it was Regan who put the Buy American clause in the contract… Termination ‘for the convenience of the government’ was the legal term. It was because the budgets were getting slashed to pieces.”
The MC-1, as it turned out, was no easy knife to manufacture, either. “The MC-1 was primarily made to go in the rescue kit for every air crew,” Furey said, “but the knife was originally made in World War Two and they made no changes or adjustments to [the design] in the years after. There were materials in the original contract you couldn’t even purchase anymore, or that were prohibitvely difficult or expensive to get, like the nickel silver for the slide lock on the switchblade itself.”
Changing times and changing budgets ultimately saw the end of Logan/Smyth’s production of the ring knife, too. “The age of the Internet killed the need for the ring knife,” Furey explained. “We saw a down-tick in 2000 and 2001. The orders just dried up. The postal service is still getting creamed by the Internet. There’s less mail going out. This started back in 2000. They simply didn’t need the knives the way they used to. It wasn’t worth us even chasing the dies on the presses. We just stopped bidding.”
Logan/Smyth Manufacturing eventually closed in 2005 after the death of Michael Furey’s father and his mother’s subsequent illness. I was saddened to hear of Mr. Furey’s loss, but extremely grateful for the insight he provided concerning his company. Little about Logan/Smyth has been published online beyond speculation about its production of the MC-1, nor was it obvious to me initially whether the company was, in fact, out of business. While Michael Furey is a busy man with many business ventures underway, it is clear to me that Logan/Smyth and its little ring knives are a topic, and a memory, that brings him great satisfaction. Given that his family’s history is intertwined with that of Logan Smyth’s postal knives, there is a certain finality to his recollections of that time in his career.
“I was president of Logan Smyth from 1985 until it closed,” he said, before concluding our interview. “It was a great living for a lot of people. Now… Now I’m the last living member.”
I worked as a retail loss prevention officer for 7 years. During one of my arrests the suspect attempted to flee so I took him to the ground and placed him in handcuffs. It wasn’t t until I had done so that I noticed that he had one of these ring knives on his middle finger, oriented inward. Thankfully no one was injured during the incident. What was even scarier was hat the man had modified the ring knife, cutting the rounded front portion of the blade off so that it had a point, which would, I presume, allow it to penetrate, not unlike a claw.
Thank you for this article. So much history on many subjects just gets lost to the sands of time. I love the fact that now with the internet, 10 years from now someone researching a flea market find will have this info at hand.
I have a few of those ring knives setting around in a box, they were used in this neck of the woods to cut thread (we, at one time, had a lot of manufacturing of textiles in my area, I know it is hard to believe)
Great job Phil
Thanks for a great article and a fascinating bit of history, Phil. I appreciate the research you put into this, as well as the great photos of the little ring knife. Great stuff!
My mother was in the WAVES (U.S.Navy,women) during WWII and worked in the Fleet Post Office, San Francisco. She brought one home. She had it in her ‘Hope Chest’ with the rest of her keepsakes.
I turned up this interesting piece of history while idling researching my old MC-1 Camillus — a once-rare item commanding hundreds of dollars at gun shows back in the 70s, if you could even find one. They were held & accounted for at Ft Campbell & Ft Bragg (where all our paratroopers worked) that sneaking one out was all but impossible. Being a minor switchblade collector, as well as a career soldier, I tried for many years to get an MC-1, with no luck. Fortunately, a very friendly 4-star general I worked for knew about my lust for the orange knife, and one day one of them just appeared in my top desk drawer, still in its little brown wrapper and plastic baggie with the NSN stamped on it. I still have it.
Anyhow, this “twine cutter” is also particularly interesting. I’ve worked with some newspaper distributors and have never seen a bundle opened with one of these. In fact, the only time I’ve seen one in my life was back home in Raymond, Washington, when I was growing up in the 50s & 60s. It’s basically a Weyerhaueser logging town, but a secondary part-time industry in that area is (or was) either peeling cascara bark or picking ferns. I mainly peeled bark in the summers (it’s used for cascara sagrada extract, the prime ingredient of many laxatives). Though I picked ferns a few times and many of my friends sort specialized in fern-picking, I don’t think I ever knew what they were used for. Only a certain type of fern was harvested, though. The picker wore one of these rings on a finger, gathered a handful of fern fronds in the other hand, and cut them off close to the ground.
Interesting that these rings were used in post offices. I worked the Xmas rushes in our local post office from about 1958 to 1963, and never saw these used to cut bundles.
However, in one of my earliest Army jobs, running a library & distribution point for classified military publications, we had several automatic bundling machines that would wrap several loops of heavy twine around a bundle of manuals or documents & then magically tie the twine at the top. Everyone I ever saw operate these machines just used a convenient pair of heavy scissors to do this job, and I can’t imagine we’d have bothered with these rings if we had them. Maybe if you moved around a lot they might be handy but they seem a poor (and slower) second to a good pair of scissors — speaking as someone who has used both.
Anyhow, I found your information quite interesting, and thought I’d pass along this probably rather minor local use for the ring-knife. I venture to guess that these would also find some real utility among flower wholesalers or florists, also.
Best regards,
G. L. White
Master Sergeant, US Army (Ret.)
I used to work at the post off in MD and I used these cutters every day.
Now I work at a recycling center and I rip open bags of cans eith with a lock knive or by hand and these little cutters would come in handy.
Do you know of any place selong them?
thanks
po
My father taught me as a young kid to “Pick Brush”. It was a great way for a kid to make money in an area that had no opportunities for any sort of earning for kids. We lived in the country and families had their own kids to do the work or did not need help so it was a way of making money when we wanted and on our schedule. We called the tool a “Fern Ring/Knife or Brush Ring/Knife”. My grandfather found in hard times that was a great way to help him put food on the table.
file:///C:/Users/Colors/Pictures/wild%20folage%20picking%20fern%20ExtensionBulletin796.pdf
I’m a Postmaster at a small rural post office in WA state. I worked up at the Plant during Christmas one year and at a couple of other post offices and mine is the only one that has a ring knife. It is a Bates size 9, that I use everyday to cut the plastic straps on my trays of letters before sorting. If Bates File Co. lost the Gov contract to Logan/Smyth in ’82, then my ring knife is at least 34 years old. With everyday use, it still cuts the straps the first time with minimal effort. I wish I had more than just the one.