Medico

Medico stands at the head of the American pipe industry's brands identified with the filter. It was launched in 1933 by New York-based S. M. Frank & Co. The brand was born not as a pipe series but first as a filter concept; the bodies were designed to carry that filter. Most of the brand's following eighty years were built on this same sequence.

The Filter Idea and the Brand's Birth

S. M. Frank & Co.'s origin traces back to 1900, when Sam Frank began selling pipes and tobacco products in New York. The firm gradually moved into its own manufacturing, working with the experienced maker Ferdinand Feuerbach to produce the well-known series of the period. In the early 1930s, public unease over tar and nicotine in smoke led the firm to develop an absorbent paper filter. The Medico brand was founded precisely to make this filter standard.

The mechanism is simple: the stem seats onto the shank not by screwing in but by a push fit (push bit); a paper filter sits in a socket inside the stem and the smoker changes it by hand whenever they wish. This design turned the filtered pipe into an everyday object requiring no servicing. The filter cartridges were used for many years even in pipes without a Medico body; in the history of pipe filters and systems, Medico paper is regarded as the American counterpart to Europe's 9 mm carbon filter tradition.