Pipes That Won't Smoke: Glass and Pratt Ware

Pipes that won't smoke is the collective name for objects that take the form of a pipe without being designed to smoke tobacco. In England, in the period stretching from the late 18th century to the early 20th, two product groups stand out under this heading: glass pipes and the raised-relief earthenware pipes known as Pratt Ware. Both share the same features that set them apart from a functional pipe: a nonporous body, heat-vulnerable material, and a smoke channel that cannot be cleaned. Museum records classify these pieces as decorative objects. The heading here is borrowed from the title of Carol Sheehan's 1981 book on argillite pipes.

Glass Pipes

Objects glassblowers made for themselves from leftover glass at the end of a shift are called friggers, whimsies, or "end-of-day" pieces in English. Traced back in records as far as 15th-century Germany, the practice gained its real popularity in the 19th century, and pipes were, alongside canes and boots, one of the recurring shapes. The name most often cited is the Nailsea glassworks, founded in Somerset by John Robert Lucas in 1788 and closed in 1873. Yet "Nailsea glass" today is more a stylistic label than a workshop credential: because other glassworks, chiefly Bristol and Stourbridge, worked in the same techniques, tying a given piece to the center that made it is often impossible.

In decoration, molten glass is wound around the body in threads or worked using the latticino technique; mottled, wavy, and ringed patterns are typical. Since glass doesn't stand up to heat, these bodies were never intended to actually be lit. Examples cited in sources that run over a meter long are meant strictly for tobacconist window display. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds an English glass pipe dated to the early 19th century (C.189-1912).

Pratt Ware and Puzzle Pipes

Pratt Ware is a light-bodied earthenware made roughly between 1780 and 1840, decorated with relief work and underglaze colors; it belongs to the era's creamware and pearlware family. The name comes from the Pratt family, who worked at Lane Delph, part of Fenton, in Staffordshire. The style was not the property of a single workshop: records indicate the same work was produced at other pottery centers too, including Yorkshire and Liverpool. Pratt Ware is thus a type name, not a manufactory.

The pipes in this group are called puzzle pipes, or pipe whimseys, in English, and take their name from the method used to make them. A long, thin clay tube is wound around a damp string and shaped into coils; keeping the clay pliable enough to bend without breaking during this stage is the real test of the process. The dried piece then goes through a biscuit firing, underglaze colors are applied, and it is glazed and fired again. Two of the examples at the Metropolitan Museum date to 1809 and 1810; another, dated to roughly 1790-1820, has three separate bowls. While coiled, these pieces run about 30-36 centimeters, but their internal tube, records indicate, runs to several meters once uncoiled.

Whether these pipes could actually be smoked has been debated since the 19th century. Exhibition reviews from the period treat keeping the smoke channel intact through all the coils as a mark of skill, while the same writings also note the difficulty of drawing smoke through such a convoluted body. Some 20th-century collecting literature has argued that the tube stayed technically open, and that the piece was therefore functional in principle. Museums today treat these pipes as decorative objects.

Their Place in Pipe History

England is regarded as the first Western country to produce the tobacco pipe on an industrial scale; records indicate that clay pipe manufacture had already become an organized trade as early as the start of the 17th century. As demand for clay declined, the same craftsmen turned to other materials: first earthenware and stoneware, then glass, and finally, in the second half of the 19th century, the briar revolution. The claim that Josiah Wedgwood's jasperware, developed in the 1770s, was also applied to pipes rests only on the exhibition writing of the period and is not backed by museum records. Glass and Pratt Ware pipes are the unsmokable links in this chain; skipping over them is considered a common gap in accounts of the world history of the pipe. Yet they were amply represented in the great collections of the era: William Bragge (1823-1884), known for his 13,000-piece pipe collection, donated his holdings to the Birmingham Free Library in the 1870s, and the writing accompanying the public exhibitions gave separate mention to English earthenware pipes. In the 1879 fire, a significant portion of the collection's pieces at the library were destroyed; the documentary side of this loss is covered in the Bragge's pipe drawings entry.