Vonnegut's Easy-Clean Pipe

[Doc Manhattan]

Buried in one of the ubiquitious list-o-surprising-facts articles on the Internet, I learned that novelist Kurt Vonnegut has a patent on an easy-to-clean pipe.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/06/celebrity-patents?pid=3449

I'm no good at reading blueprints, but it appears that there's a tube that tranverses the pipe from stummel to stem, and can be popped out the stummel end for cleaning. Sort of a removable version of the "gun-barrel" on Kirstens.

Maybe not the smartest thing he ever put on paper, but interesting. For a mostly-cig smoker, he gave the pipe a lot of thought.

 

[Fishfuzz]

Great read!

 

[Kyle Weiss]

Pretty complicated for a simple ol' tobacco pipe, but he was a complicated man. *shrug* Nice find, DM.

 

[Hermit]

Did he smoke a pipe?
I only see pictures of him with a cigarette.

 

[mark]

I like it. It's one of the few oddball designs that actually makes sense. Whether it's practical or not in use is debatable, but the concept is sound in my book.

 

[riff raff]

That's pretty interesting. I wonder if he pedaled it to the various pipe companies of the time?

 

[George Kaplan]

I had a really strange dream about Kurt Vonnegut once. On the night of April 10, 2007, I dreamed I was helping the estranged teenage daughter of Vonnegut and actress Catherine Keener track him down to get back in touch with him. We found him living in an old ice cream truck in Titusville, Florida. I don't remember him smoking a pipe. I remember the date of that dream because it was the night before he died.

 

[motie2]

Update

https://www.theatlantic.com/technol...on-kurt-vonneguts-tobacco-pipe-cleaner/62092/
Here's the patent diagram