Peterson Gratis pipe tool

(Rev. 07/15/2022 with thanks to Dixon Smith) Back in 2018 Kris Parry at the Black Swan Shoppe sent me a Peterson-branded 3-in-1 pipe tool.* It turned out to be a generic but well-made instrument but got me thinking about the original Gratis Pipe Tools that accompanied System pipes from 1891 until 1963 or so. With a gift from my co-author Gary Malmberg and research on K&P’s 1896 catalog, I can now offer a visual history and tentative dating guide. Bach Smokes the Thinking Man's Pipe (a 4s, of course) 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 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 about 1850, or twenty years before briar began to come onto the pipe smoking scene in a big way, pipemen had come to a consensus that there are three operations which require some kind of tool when smoking one’s pipe: (1) “stopping” or “tamping,” (2) clearing clogs from the draft hole, and (3) unloading smoked and unsmoked tobacco from the chamber. Charles Peterson was not only a great artisan, inventor and entrepreneur but a guy who smoked like a freight train, so he knew from the get-go that his Patent System pipes deserved a quick-reach all-purpose tool to keep them functioning their best. Having already provided a fairly comprehensive user’s guide in the 1896 catalog, he realized that charity consists more in action than words. Accordingly, from the outset his company provided every single System pipe they made with a 3-in-1 pipe tool. For the next seventy years, it was the best advertising K&P could have done: every time a pipeman picked up the Gratis tool, he remembered how much he liked his System pipe. Czech, mate? A close copy of the K&P Gratis Tool The Gratis Tool is still seen in auctions a few times a year on eBay, but most smokers know it through its later clone, the “Czech Tool” (so-called because the genuine article says MADE IN over CZECH REPUBLIC on the tamper stem). It would be great to say that Charles Peterson invented the 3-in-1 tool, or at least patented K&P’s version, but as it turns out earlier versions had already been circulation for a while. One of the first patents for a 3-in-1 was by Gustavus Miller, from 1864. In his patent letter he writes that “it is well known that devices of similar kind have been used long since by smokers; but they…