French Art Deco Pipes with a Ball-Shaped Chamber

French Art Deco pipes with a ball-shaped chamber are a small group of pipes made in workshops around Paris in the first quarter of the twentieth century, fitting none of the established shape systems entirely. The shared description runs as follows: a slim body twelve to thirteen centimetres long, a meerschaum bowl at one end, a yellow amber mouthpiece at the other, and a silver or gold ball right at the center. The ball is not decorative; once its screw cap is removed it opens into a small chamber, dividing the pipe in two.

The Paris Workshops and the Period

Every firm known to have made this design is of French origin. Lancel began in 1876 as a small Paris shop opened by Angèle and Alphonse Lancel, selling pipes and smoking accessories; though the firm shifted its focus toward leather goods after the 1880s, pieces with the ball chamber signed "A. Lancel" and addressed on boulevard Montmartre are dated to the 1910s and 1920s. Sommer Frères, founded according to records in the 1860s, was another Paris firm running both a factory and a retail shop; an example of the same design dated to around 1925 is attributed to this name. Similar pieces stamped GBD are also known. The ball construction wasn't confined to pipes alone; it was also applied to cigarette holders of the period. Some of these pieces survive with their original boxes, embossed on the lining with the maker's or retailer's mark; in one reported example, this embossing points to an address in the Passage des Panoramas, Paris's oldest covered arcade, opened in 1800. The style's name fits the same frame: "Art Deco" takes its name from the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, held in Paris in 1925; the term itself only became widespread as a period label around the 1960s.

The Cotton Inside the Ball

When the ball is opened, a wad of cotton comes out; auction descriptions and collector notes record this arrangement as a cotton filter. Sitting in the smoke's path, the chamber both traps condensed moisture and acts as a simple filtering pocket. The idea itself was nothing new for the period. Frank Ellery of Vermont's 1879 U.S. patent no. 219,571 proposed making the bowl in two nested parts, with the gap between them packed with a porous filling such as oakum, wick, or cotton, so as to keep condensed liquid from reaching the shank joint. Albrecht Reuss of Cannstatt's 1893 U.S. patent no. 501,808 does the same job with a cotton plug pressed under the cap at the end of the shank. English patent abstracts from the same years also record tobacco-pipe entries working with cotton, charcoal, and similar absorbent fillings. The French examples can be seen as this same search turned into fine jewelry-making; the industrialized answer to the same problem was the 9mm filters, and balsa and carbon rods, that spread mid-century. For the fuller picture, see pipe filters and systems.

A Shape Without a Name

Which family these pieces belong to remains unsettled, because several criteria exist and none of them quite fit. Going by size, the 19th-century slang dictionaries' "nose warmer" — a very short pipe gripped by the teeth — comes to mind; but that description is tied more to clay examples and working-class use. The pocket criterion calls up the names "opera pipe" and "vest-pocket pipe": in the first, the sides of the body are flattened so it lies against a jacket pocket, and in the second the bowl is left oval; in ball-chamber examples, however, the body is not flattened and the bowl is left round. The third criterion, the "novelty" category, covers objects made to be looked at rather than smoked; the pipes here, though, are working implements. What's left is descriptive naming: auction catalogues today identify them simply by listing their materials and parts. No record has surfaced of an established French-language name for the form in its own period. For a sense of where standard naming conventions draw their lines, see classic pipe shapes.