William H. Hendrikx

William H. Hendrikx is a maker who worked in New York State during the interwar period, whose name today is traced largely through a pipe patent registered in 1934. He held two entirely different positions in his career: he was first a manager running briar pipe factories in the College Point section of New York, then set up his own bench in a small settlement in the Hudson Valley and made pipes alone. This dual history shows how permeable the line between factory production and handmade work was in America of that era, a point also discussed in the artisan pipe and factory pipe entry.

A Manager in the Factory Years

Hendrikx's first professional identity in the United States was not as a maker but as a manager. He is said to have headed the A. Frankau & Co. factory in College Point in 1923; this plant is stated to have been the American production arm of the English BBB brand. In later years he is also associated with managing the Hesson factory, located in the same Long Island neighborhood; this period of management is said to have lasted about twenty years.

Information about the maker's life before coming to America rests only on accounts in pipe literature and is not supported by any independent record. According to these accounts he was born around 1882 in Amsterdam, the son of a language teacher; though he learned several languages as a child, he sought his own path in handcraft and entered the trade working part-time in a Dutch pipe factory. The same sources state he emigrated to Quebec, Canada, around 1906, and had settled on Long Island by 1915.

The Bench at Ulster Park

After his years as a manager, Hendrikx's plan was to work the land in Ulster County; when the stock market crash upended that plan, he returned to his old trade. In a converted barn in Ulster Park, in the township of Esopus, he set up his bench and began producing handmade pipes. Sources cite the late 1920s for the workshop's founding, though this is internally inconsistent since the same account places the founding after the 1929 crash. What is certain is that he was living in Ulster Park when he filed his patent application in 1931. His name was already known in the trade; the words "Buy American Products" painted in large letters on the workshop's outer wall, along with the sign facing the road, are said to have made him recognized in the area.

The 1934 Patent

The application Hendrikx filed on 31 July 1931 was registered on 27 March 1934 under number 1,952,862. In the document, the inventor is listed as "William Hendrikx, Ulster Park, New York"; the rights were assigned to William De Muth & Company of New York. The seven-claim design rests on a two-piece metal tube connecting the shank and the mouthpiece: an end piece screws into the narrow hole opening from the shank into the chamber, and a thin tube fixed inside the mouthpiece fits into it, forming a sealed joint. The smoke channel is unbroken along this joint and narrows in stages from the chamber toward the mouth.

The purposes listed in the document fall under three headings: keeping saliva from advancing into the chamber and mixing with the tobacco juice; holding moisture that collects inside the tube at a step in the channel to prevent gurgling and backflow; and letting a pipe cleaner pass along the entire smoke path without disassembling any part of the pipe. In this respect the design sits within the period's trend of metal condenser and filter systems. Hendrikx used this mouthpiece in most of the pipes he made in Ulster Park.

What Remains

According to information based on New York State health records, Hendrikx died on 23 August 1961; his health had declined in his last two years, and he could no longer work at the bench. Pipes bearing his signature are rare today. His name is tracked mainly through the trace he left in his patent filing, which makes him one of the documented members of the crowded generation of inventors who experimented with metal tubes to keep the pipe smoking drier in the early twentieth century.