System Pipes

“Beannachtaí na Féile Padraig Ort”— Blessings of Patrick’s Festival Upon You! The Mystery of the NAP As the Chicagoland book launch for The Peterson Pipe: The Story of Kapp & Peterson draws near, there are a few things I’d like to share in celebration. The first concerns Charles Peterson’s second Patent System (that’s right, there were two), the NAP. The NAP Patent System is the most intriguing unsolved mystery my co-author Gary Malmberg and I uncovered in the writing the book. Even if no one else knows or remembers, Pete Geeks know that in 1898, Charles Peterson finalized the P-Lip Patent System. But what even many of them don’t know is that just six years later, on January 2nd, 1904, the inventor, artisan woodturner and entrepeneur applied for a new System mouthpiece patent, the “NAP,” which was granted eighteen months later and then advertised in the mammoth 1906 catalog. Gary and I had seen a NAP Patent at Sallynoggin in 2013, and in subsequent research Mario Lubinski provided photographs from his personal collection of vintage amber NAP mouthpieces. Overwhelmed by everything else we had to accomplish in our short research trip, the question nevertheless haunted us:  Why did Charles Peterson pursue a second patent for his System? How did it smoke? Why didn’t the company pursue it? All we could do at the time was document our findings and move on. All that changed last fall when Gary acquired an Irish Free State NAP System 2, shape 312, with an obviously well-used mouthpiece. “I found that smoking this NAP lip is not even remotely like smoking a P-Lip, nor like smoking a fishtail,” Gary wrote me. “It is better than both.”    Origin of the Name The word “NAP” in all caps, baffled us, but with other more pressing matters to contend with, we simply noted it and let it pass. Had we been to the race track, of course, we would have known. NAP comes from British (and Irish) horse-racing slang. 1 According to Wikipedia, “A tipster is someone who regularly provides information (tip) on the likely outcomes of sporting events . . . . A tip that is considered to be a racing certainty . . . is also called a nap [often capitalized as NAP] and tipsters in newspapers will tend to indicate the “nap.” . . . Nap (derived from the card game Napoleon) indicates this is the tipster’s most confident selection of the day.” Hence, when Charles Peterson named his new patent mouthpiece a “NAP,” he was saying in words his customers would understand that it was certain to be a winner. Peterson seems to have a spent a little time at the track himself, from one humorous cabinet photograph reproduced in The Peterson Pipe and preserved in Sallynoggin. In the photograph, he and his brother John are seated outdoors smoking their House pipes. A horse is seated (yes, seated on a chair) on the right, smoking his own House—or horse—pipe, with the legend KAPP…