Tobacco pipe

[1] Pipes can range from very simple machine-made briar models to highly prized hand-made artisanal implements made by renowned pipemakers, which are often very expensive collector's items.

[citation needed] A pipe's fundamental function is to provide a relatively safe, manipulable volume in which to incompletely combust a smokable substance.

Typically this is accomplished by connecting a refractory 'bowl' to some sort of 'stem' which extends and may also cool the smoke mixture drawn through the combusting organic mass (see below).

Known as the bore (10), the inner shaft of this second section stays uniform throughout while the outer stem tapers down to the mouthpiece or bit (8) held in the smoker's teeth, and finally ends in the "lip" (9), attenuated for comfort.

The bowls of tobacco pipes are commonly made of briar wood, meerschaum, corncob, pear-wood, rose-wood or clay.

Stems and bits of tobacco pipes are usually made of moldable materials like Ebonite, Lucite, Bakelite, or soft plastic.

Calabash gourds (usually with meerschaum or porcelain bowls set inside them) have long made prized pipes, but they are labour-intensive and, today, quite expensive.

[5] While there are promotional stills of Basil Rathbone smoking calabash pipes as Holmes for other projects, most notably his radio show, in his first two outings as Holmes produced by 20th Century-Fox as taking place in the Victorian era, Rathbone smoked an apple-bowled, black briar with a half bend, made by Dunhill,[citation needed] the company known for making the best pipes at that time.

[citation needed] In the next dozen films, the series produced by Universal Studios, with Holmes and Watson updated to the 1940s, Rathbone smokes a much less expensive Peterson half bend with a billiard-shaped bowl.

[citation needed] In the original chronicles, such as "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches", Sherlock Holmes is described as smoking a long-stemmed cherrywood, which he favored "when in a disputatious, rather than a meditative mood."

[6] Modern hookah smokers, especially in the US, smoke "me'assel", "moassel", "molasses" or "shisha", all names for the same wet mixture of tobacco, molasses/honey, glycerine, and often, flavoring.

North American natives along the East coast traditionally made their tobacco pipes from clay or from a type of pot-stone (lapis ollaris), or else serpentine stone.

Briar is cut from the root burl of the tree heath (Erica arborea), which is native to the rocky and sandy soils of the Mediterranean region.

[9] Contrary to popular belief, the stems were not broken off for the next patron when shared in taverns, as the understanding of germs at the time would not have prompted this behavior.

[11] Short stemmed pipes, sometimes called cuttys or nose warmers in England, were preferred by manual laborers as they could be gripped between the teeth, leaving both of the smoker's hands free.

After being dried for two years, the cobs are hollowed out to form a bowl shape, then either dipped in a plaster-based mixture or varnished or lacquered on the outside.

[14] General Douglas MacArthur and Mark Twain were perhaps the most famous historical smokers of corncob pipes, as well as fictional cartoon characters Popeye and Frosty the Snowman.

[18] Meerschaum (hydrated magnesium silicate), a mineral found in small shallow deposits mainly around the city of Eskişehir in central Turkey, is prized for the properties which allow it to be carved into finely detailed decorative and figural shapes.

The word "meerschaum" means "sea foam" in German, alluding to its natural white color and its surprisingly low weight.

Meerschaum is a very porous mineral that absorbs the tars and oils during the smoking process, and gradually changes color to a golden brown.

Marketed under names such as "the pipe", "The Smoke" and "Venturi", they used materials such as pyrolytic graphite, phenolic resin, nylon, Bakelite and other synthetics, allowing for higher temperatures in the bowl, reduced tar, and aesthetic variations of color and style.

In 18th-century North America, smokers used a "tobacco-stopper" to press tobacco into the pipe’s bowl, with some of these stoppers made from bones, such as those extracted from the male anatomy of raccoons, reflecting the resourcefulness of the era’s material culture.

In the most common method of packing, tobacco is added to the bowl of the pipe in several batches, each one pressed down until the mixture has a uniform density that optimizes airflow (something that it is difficult to gauge without practice).

An alternative packing technique called the Frank method involves lightly dropping tobacco in the pipe, after which a large plug is gingerly pushed into the bowl all at once.

These generally involve coating the chamber with any of a variety of substances, or by gently smoking a new pipe to build up a cake (a mixture of ash, unburned tobacco, oils, sugars, and other residue) on the walls.

It is merely brought into the mouth, pumped around oral and nasal cavities to permit absorption of nicotine toward the brain through the mucous membranes, and released.

Meerschaum pipes are held in a square of chamois leather, with gloves, or else by the stem in order to prevent uneven coloring of the material.

Cake is considered undesirable in meerschaum pipes because it can easily crack the bowl or interfere with the mineral's natural porosity.

[25] When tobacco is burned, oils from adjoining not yet ignited particles vaporize and condense into the existing cake on the walls of the bowl and shank.

Over time, these oils can oxidize and turn rancid, causing the pipe to give a sour or bitter smoke.