As for masters, real masters

by former hater of plastic, Tuesday, February 20, 2018, 10:51 (2469 days ago) @ former hater of plastic

those did not come about until the experimentation of the ABS founders and those who followed, sharing results, and true advances came about with unheard of blade performance.

From the turn of last century, until 1960, there was Scagel who was a smith with an eye for wonderful art, one protégé of sorts, Bo Randall, who was a wealthy newspaper family dilettante minding his family's diversification into orange growing in the 1920s/30s who stumbled across Scagel work while vacationing up north. There also was US CAV farrier Rudy Ruana banging out blades for Indian horsebreakers, wanting a knife which could handle frozen winterkill horse carcasses, and later for Montana hunters tired of factory knives falling apart in the middle of nowhere. Randall got into it as a hobby, and when WWII and fame broke out, he had the ability and means to promote, promptly hired workers and a foreman, and his business was born.

But no masters, only guys taking a bar and beating out a blade and grinding to shape, smithing pure and simple, on nrarly a factory level, the Swede O1 making a blade far superior in edge holding to most factory knives.
Ruana probably did more experimenting and had higher performance blades and geometry, frankly, as Randall was a tinkerer, and was nobody who actually was at the forge for a living for very long at all, their blade techniques have not changed essentially since it started, same formulas, single largest change being the electric heat treat oven in early 1950s. To take nothing away, they probably were among the finest knives money could buy into the 1960s. But, masters, not.