The Lyon Pipe (the Dawes Pipe)

The Lyon Pipe is a two-chamber pipe design, its bowls fitting one inside the other, developed by American inventor Charles H. Lyon in Chicago in the early 1920s. Today it is better known as the Dawes pipe, so called because it became something close to a personal emblem in the hands of Charles G. Dawes, a well-known figure in American politics. An ordinary workshop invention turning into a national campaign symbol is a story with few parallels in pipe history.

The Logic of the Design

Lyon's solution rests on splitting the bowl in two rather than carving it as a single piece. The inner bowl, where the tobacco burns, screws into the outer chamber. According to the patent text, when the deep threading on the outside of the inner bowl meets the shallow threading inside the outer one, a spiral, winding smoke passage forms between them. Smoke slows in this passage, changes direction, and sheds some of the solid particles it carries; only after this does it reach the shank channel through the opening beneath the inner bowl. The patent text claims this arrangement "purifies" the smoke. Placing a second cavity between the chamber where the tobacco burns and the path to the mouthpiece is an approach we also encounter in the calabash pipe. A removable plug at the bottom of the bowl makes cleaning easier.

That the threading performs both joining and filtering at once — a "double duty" placed on the threads, in the patent's own words — is the design's most original aspect. For another example of the period's search for a smoke channel, see the article on the Falk patent.