World War I pipe

World War I soldier’s room untouched for almost 100 years

Willis Carrier invented air conditioning and possibly smoked a pipe

click to enlarge

On the anniversary of air conditioning at OUPblog.

Blog tip: The Tobacco Pipe Artistory

My friend Brer from PowerOfBabel recently sent me a couple of pipe pix by email.  This is one of them.  I looked it up to see if I could find where he had found it, and came across an excellent pipe blog.

The world of antique pipes is a fascinating place full of surprising materials, shapes, styles, sizes and configurations and, depending on where the pipes were produced, can be encountered in a broad range of embellishments and accents in precious and semi-precious stones, silver and gold filigree, amber, ivory, horn, bone, and tortoiseshell.

Pipe Artistory covers a wide range of pipe & tobacco lore from history, with lots and lots of pictures. I recommend it.

Some museum pipes

Today my family and I visited the Witte Museum in San Antonio, and on our tour through the section on Texas history, I made sure to keep an eye out for pipes.

Click all pictures for larger versions.  I was only using my phone camera, so the details aren't sharp, but here is an example of a Native American pipe and if you enlarge it you can read the texts at the upper left.  Not clear in the picture here, but above the pipe are examples of "cane cigarettes," or let's say "cigarette-shaped" sections of cane which were used for smoking, sort of like a straight pipe with no bowl.  One of them was found still packed with juniper leaves, which were apparently used for smoking.  At the lower right is a "tobacco" pouch, the pouch made from prickly pear pads and still holding a large quantity of juniper.

There was also a section on German settlers in early Texas, which is of particular interest to me because those are the people I came from.  Here is a Tyrolean-style pipe brought to Texas by an unidentified German emigrant around 1850.

And another German pipe, this one belonging to Heinrich Steves, who came to Texas with his family in 1849.

Guy Fawkes effigies

With pipe.  Found here.