The Lyon Pipe (the Dawes Pipe)

The Lyon Pipe is a two-chamber pipe design, its bowls fitting one inside the other, developed by American inventor Charles H. Lyon in Chicago in the early 1920s. Today it is better known as the Dawes pipe, so called because it became something close to a personal emblem in the hands of Charles G. Dawes, a well-known figure in American politics. An ordinary workshop invention turning into a national campaign symbol is a story with few parallels in pipe history.

The Logic of the Design

Lyon's solution rests on splitting the bowl in two rather than carving it as a single piece. The inner bowl, where the tobacco burns, screws into the outer chamber. According to the patent text, when the deep threading on the outside of the inner bowl meets the shallow threading inside the outer one, a spiral, winding smoke passage forms between them. Smoke slows in this passage, changes direction, and sheds some of the solid particles it carries; only after this does it reach the shank channel through the opening beneath the inner bowl. The patent text claims this arrangement "purifies" the smoke. Placing a second cavity between the chamber where the tobacco burns and the path to the mouthpiece is an approach we also encounter in the calabash pipe. A removable plug at the bottom of the bowl makes cleaning easier.

That the threading performs both joining and filtering at once — a "double duty" placed on the threads, in the patent's own words — is the design's most original aspect. For another example of the period's search for a smoke channel, see the article on the Falk patent.

The Inventor and a Twist of Fate

Records describe Lyon as a former mill machinist who had lost his right arm in a factory accident during the First World War. By the end of 1920 he was out of work, and nearing sixty, was looking for a new way to make a living. The idea for the pipe was born during that search; the patent application was filed on September 23, 1920, and the registration completed on September 18, 1923.

The story goes that Lyon, noticing that Dawes smoked a pipe, sent him a sample in 1921. Dawes liked the design and began ordering it by the dozen; the two became friends over time. According to one account, based on Lyon's obituary published in early 1947, the two even became partners in production in later years; no other record confirming this partnership has been found.

Becoming a Campaign Symbol

Dawes became Calvin Coolidge's running mate in the 1924 election and handed the pipe out as a campaign gift; the party used it almost as an emblem. After the nomination was announced, the small workshop outside Chicago could no longer keep up with demand. According to a Chicago-datelined report in the Ellensburg Daily Record of September 11, 1924, the backlog of orders had reached 75,000, while production stayed around a thousand pipes a month. These figures rest on a single newspaper report and have not been independently confirmed.

Dawes served as Vice President from 1925 to 1929, shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1925, and later served as Ambassador to the United Kingdom. This visibility gave Lyon's design an extraordinary degree of recognition at a time when the briar pipe was already widespread in America. Today, examples stamped Lyon and Dawes are counted as collector's pieces documenting the mechanical pipe experiments of the early twentieth century.