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History of tobacco pipes
motie2
Master
I thought there was a history of pipes discussion but I couldn't find it using the TRL search engine. Sorry.
<<Would you like to know why Savinelli pipes have such a storied history among pipe smoking enthusiasts? Want to wow your friends with your knowledge of the favorite tobacco pipes of Mark Twain, Sherlock Holmes, or President Eisenhower? It’s all here for you, in our completely bias and often incomplete tobacco pipes history and the stories of the brands that make them. Choose your favorite brand and impress your smoking buddies with a little trivia. We can’t promise they won’t make fun of you if you begin referring to your favorite pipe as a thoroughbred, but we’re sure they’ll be impressed that you know why the thinking man smokes a Peterson Pipe;but a clever chap prefers a Vauen. Waste a couple hours here and you’ll be calling yourself a pipe smoking aficionado and have the knowledge of pipe history to back up your claim!>>
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@moie2 Thanks for the info. The more I know the less stupid questions I have to ask on the forum.
I'm sure the answer is somewhere on the internet - but for the life of me I can't figure what prompted the very first smoker to crumble up a leaf - light it - then stand over the fire and deeply inhale it. Then after the initial coughing jag he or she takes it a step further to create a device to pack those crumbled leaves into (for lack of a better word let's call that device a ... pipe ... Yea, that sounds good for now - I'll think of a better term for it later) then stuff it with leaves and begin puffing. Who does that sort of thing? Possibly the first guy to open up a clam or an oyster and think ... that looks like something I want to put into my mouth.
The History of the Tobacco Pipe
The history of the tobacco pipe is long and quite fascinating and could fill many volumes. As it is the purpose of this piece to cover many and several aspects of pipes and pipe smoking, a limited and general look at that history seems the practical course here.
I suppose we can all be grateful to John Rolfe who had the inspiration to plant tobacco seed from Trinidad in my native Virginia soil – just a few miles from my birthplace – in 1612. His first crop of tobacco ( nicotiana tabacum ) found great favor at court back in England, as it was a far tastier smoke than the rough native North American species introduced in London some years before. And popular it was, as just over a ton of Virginia tobacco shipped to London in the year spanning 1616 -1617.
And by 1620, some 40,000 lbs. of tobacco made it’s way from the banks of the James River in Virginia across the Atlantic and up the Thames to London docks. Much of this tobacco was consumed by “drinking” the smoke from a pipe. So, some four hundred years ago pipe smoking was taking England and Europe by storm.
The pipe itself, as a means of smoking tobacco, had a much earlier appearance. Some 3,000 years before Englishman John Rolfe’s fortunate experiment at Jamestown, Native American tribes were smoking pipes in the Mississippi Valley area of the U.S. Ancient relic pipes found there were adorned with figures of animals and other decorative markings and were mostly made of porphyritic and other hard stone. Early English and European pipes were generally made of clay and were the simple long stemmed pipes that many know today as the clay tavern pipe.
Most clay pipe making was done in London and Bristol in the 1650’s using clay from the abundant nearby deposits in Devon. Though adequate, clay pipes were fragile and were frequently broken, often leaving the smoker with tobacco and no way to enjoy it. By the early 1700’s, meerschaum from Turkey and Africa was beginning to be employed to fashion tobacco pipes.
Carved Meerschaum Pipe from the Dr. Sarunas “Sharkey” Peckus Pipe Collection as seen in Collecting Antique Meerschaums by Ben Rapaport
Meerschaum, from the German for “foam of the sea”, is mined from deposits of the skeletal remains of microscopic sea creatures that settled to the bottom of ancient sea beds and was compressed over millions of years. The highest quality meerschaum is found in Turkey near Istanbul. This attractive chalk white material has the consistency of soft cheese when first extracted. This facilitates the ornate and often beautiful carvings one associates with these pipes. As the material is warmed by the sun, or in a warming room, it hardens and can provide a very pleasant, cool and dry smoke. Because of it’s capacity for accepting ornate carving, meerschaum pipes became quite popular with the upper classes. It did, however, share the unfortunate trait of the fragility that plagued the clay pipe, still smoked by most commoners of the time. As a result, pipe smoking was in decline by the turn of the 19th century, being replaced by the cigar and the cigarette. There was a growing need for a robust, serviceable and economical material for pipe making.
Dunhill pipe courtesy Uptown’s
Nearly every pipe one encounters today is fashioned from briar. It is a nearly perfect material for a pipe bowl. Though fine grained and quite hard and heat resistant, briar is reasonably light weight, non – toxic, and often can be quite beautiful. And best of all, it is far more durable than either clay or meerschaum.
Some may say that the advent of the briar pipe saved the pipe smoking pastime from being supplanted by cigars and cigarettes. In the 1820’s artisans from the French town of St. Claude in the Jura Mountains, renown for their wood carving skills, began to produce pipes with bowls made from the burl of the white heath tree. (erica arborea) This wood was called “bruyere” and through the years has become known as briar.>>
Anyway, the archaeologists said that this is where the pipe term "stubby" and/or "nose warmer" comes from. Does anyone know anything different or are they correct? My guess is that they might be correct simply because it seems to be an odd piece of pipe trivia for trained archaeologists to memorize.