96. The Peterson 3-in-1 Pipe Tool
I happened on a Peterson-branded 3-in-1 pipe tool a few months ago and sent it to my Dad, who said he loved it: the heft, the utility, the design. I’d been using my Gratis with Peterson’s Patent System Pipes 3-in-1 for several years and couldn’t see how the new one could beat it. I forgot about the new one until Kerry at the Black Swann sent me one with a Peterson I’d ordered. I took the new tool with me to the Chicagoland Show, not wanting to risk my old Gratis tool and found myself falling in love with it for just the reasons my Dad enumerated. I saw the same tool for sale at the Chicago show, but without the Peterson branding. When I returned home, now pretty enthusiastic about it, I got in touch with Conor Palmer, commercial director at Peterson, to ask whether it was something proprietary or not, and how long the company’s been offering it. He replied: That pipe tool has been around for a number of years—I’m going to say at least fifteen. There is no difference between the one that is branded Peterson and the plain one without any branding – There have been a number of occasions when the tools arrived to us without the branding when we asked for it to be branded (!), and as it’s sourced in the Far East, it’s simply not worth our while sending them back. In fact, the specific shape of pipe tool isn’t unique to Peterson and I believe there are others using it. We use them primarily for promotional purposes (such as with a high-grade pipe) but they are also available for sale with any distributor and in turn retailers. The problem is that there are plenty of varieties and options on pipe tools and more often than not its some locally-sourced tool that people go for on account of cost. "The Thinking Man Smokes Bach's Pipe" Now as long as there have been pipes, there have been tampers. If you haven’t used your finger as a tamp, you probably haven’t smoked more than a bowl or two, because along about the second or third burned finger, you learned to keep a tamper handy. In the beginning (as you may know), tampers were called “stoppers,” and Johann Sebastian Bach (a man who loved his pipe), had this to say about them: How oft it happens when one’s smoking: The stopper’s missing from its shelf, And as one goes with one’s finger poking Into the bowl and burns oneself. If in the pipe such pain doeth dwell, How hot must be the pains of Hell! * By the mid-19th century, well before briar became the norm, smokers seemed to have arrived at a consensus that there’s three basic operations that may need to be done while smoking one’s pipe: (1) the aforesaid “stopping” or “tamping,” (2) clearing clogs from the draft hole with some kind of pick and (3) unloading smoked or unsmoked tobacco…