Pipe Materials and Construction

Pipe materials and construction is an umbrella heading that considers together the two variables shaping both a pipe's appearance and its smoking behavior. The result changes as much with how the body is built as with what material the bowl is made from: the path the smoke channel follows, whether an air gap sits beneath the bowl, and how the stem seats into the shank.

Part names and their placement are covered in the pipe anatomy entry, and a criterion-by-criterion comparison of materials is found in pipe bowl materials.

The Framework of Natural Materials

The standard material of the modern pipe, briar — the root burl of the tree heath (Erica arborea) that grows around the Mediterranean — earned its place through its resistance to fire and its ability to absorb the moisture released during smoking. Before briar settled into that position in the second half of the 19th century, Europe's dominant material was fired clay. From the 16th century, when tobacco entered the continent, the clay pipe was in the hand of smokers of every class; Westminster's pipe makers were numerous enough by 1619 to become a livery company under royal charter. Among mineral-derived materials, meerschaum stands out: its name means "sea foam" in German, and the principal deposits of this soft sepiolite lie around Eskişehir, with secondary deposits in Somalia's El Buur region. Because its porous structure draws in moisture and tar, the surface, as it is used, turns from bottom to top through tones running from yellow to amber.

At the far end of the list are rarer materials: oak blackened over thousands of years in a bog (bog oak), pipestone carved from North America's red catlinite, and fired porcelain. In the calabash pipe, the body is made from a gourd, while the bowl surface that contacts fire is usually a separate piece of meerschaum or porcelain. The workshop that turned the corn cob pipe into a cheap, mass-producible product was founded in 1869 in Washington, Missouri; the Dutch immigrant carpenter Henry Tibbe patented, in 1878, the method that boosted the cob's durability by filling its pores from the outside with a plaster-like compound. The company took the name Missouri Meerschaum in 1907.