Jobey

Jobey is a pipe brand that catered mainly to the North American market throughout the twentieth century, with its owner and manufacturer changing hands repeatedly. Today the name is most associated with two things: the screw-in "Jobey Link" fitting joining stem and shank, and its line of free-shaped pipes made in Denmark in the seventies.

Because its early history is carried not by a tidy corporate archive but by scattered registration records and period publications, many points of the brand's past remain in dispute to this day.

The Origin Dispute

Pipe literature repeated for years that the brand was born in England around 1920 and later moved to the U.S. No document supporting this account has ever been produced, and it remains an unverified claim. The earliest trace that can be tied to a document is instead in the U.S.: Louis and Ulysse N. Jobey, living in Brooklyn, filed for a pipe design on 9 November 1914, and the design was registered as USD46998 on 23 February 1915. The same surname also appears in the management of another, separate pipe company incorporated in New Jersey, listed in a company directory from the twenties; as the account goes, Louis Jobey went bankrupt in the meantime, in 1918. These scattered records suggest the name may have been American from the start, but they are not enough to reach a firm conclusion; the matter is a typical example of the debate over how patent and registration records are read for dating.