Sir Walter didn't know about marketing, but he didn't need to.
Navigator and  English politician, but also favoured by Elisabeth I, Walter Raleigh (1552-1618) explored the lands of northern America, including Florida and North Carolina coming across a wide and flourishing land which he graciously took possession of giving it the name of Virginia. As souvenir from his trip he brought back from Europe in 1584 the tobacco. According to some he also brought back potatoes, but this is another story.

The new product, although advertisement hadn't yet been invented, obtained a success and diffusion incredibly above the budget (back then it wasn't called that, but all those fields in Virginia had to be sowed with something). In truth, the Spanish Francisco Hernandez Boncalo had already introduced the seeds in Spain and Jean Nicot de Villemain, ambassador of France in Portugal in 1560 sent as a gift, highlighting the medical properties, the same seeds to Francesco II and Caterina de'Medici just in time to be blown off by monk André Thévet who not only reminded them that he brought it to France in 1556 but also, at least him, made the effort to collect it on site. But the French would name even the trash can in order to belong to history (v. Poubelle) and the botanist J. Balechambs in the Historia Plantarum (1586) sided with the ambassador registering Herba Nicotiana and Linneo sancì Nicotiana Tabacum. In Italy this issue was dealt religiously; the cardinal Prospero di Santa Croce, apostolic nuncio in Lisbon, in 1561 delivered the precious seeds in Rome surpassing bishop Nicolò Tornabuoni ambassador of Florence in France. You may be asking yourselves, rightly so, was Cristoforo Colombo blind when he landed, in 1492, nearly a century before, in the Bahamas, Cuba and Haiti? Objection taken. Indeed it is not a coincidence that etymologically the Spanish word "tabaco", according to reports from the Indies, was the Haitian name given to the plant, but how come the Arabs had already named a few of their medical plants "tabbaq"?

Luckily, the story of the pipe is clearer. Our Sir Walter, who in order to speed up delivery time (just in time) start cultivating in Ireland, mindful of those tools deliciously stuck between the lips of those savages still lost in the pre Columbian in 1586, ordered the production of clay pipes in London. Or at least it seems. The usual opposition sustains that they already existed in Brosley, Shropshire in 1575... that is ten years before the first harvest? Either way, Sir Walter makes career, as Governor of Jersey (1601) like an unknown socialist during a change of the administration council. James I, who - by the way - didn't smoke, accuses him of a plot against the sovereign and condemns him to death. Locked in the Tower of London, Sir Walter reproposes himself ensuring that, this time, would return from an expedition to South America (Guiana) full of gold. The expedition is a disaster (and to imagine that if he had disembarked on the western coast he would had found other types of leaves...) And the King, who kept his word, left him to the guillotine.

Poor Sir Walter, had he lived a few more decades he would have seen the birth, in 1690, of the ceramic pipe by the Austrian doctor Johan Franz Vilarius. A few decades later (1750) and a shoe maker from Budapest, named Kovacs, by request of the Count of Andrassy - back from a trip to Turkey - shapes a couple of pipes from a block of meerschaum. A century later, and there it is, finally, the briar pipe. Obviously it was an era rich in mail and news, and therefore easier to know with certainty the origin of things. Forget it. We are talking about legends; the French man who in Corsica broke his meerschaum pipe and asked a craftsman to remake it using the local wood. In Saint-Claude, French city located in Giura, they swear they have been producing  pipes since the French revolution, and what about the family Piotti who already in 1850 was selling briar pipes in the small market of Sacro Monte di Varese? In Corsica, France and Italy, between the Mediterranean vegetation grows luxuriant the erica arborea, splendid and unique raw material. Sir Walter didn't know about marketing but the English already  knew a few commercial tricks.

They remind us to have been the first to adopt the set of rules, British Standards, for something of great importance; since they had the largest commercial and military fleet in the world, in order to avoid confusion they established that in the ship the only rope was that of the bell, and all the other were given a different name and set of rules which established diameter, composition and tolerance.
What would it take to apply the same to pipes? Who establishes the rules of the market, who buys and who sells? Indeed we English do both things... Said and done, they choose the best clay, ceramic, and meerschaum shapes and reproduced them in briar with a few variations and classified  them.

If the you thing the prologue is too long, what about over a century of denominations by now obtained?



 
 
 

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