Tobacco pipe

A tobacco pipe, often called simply a pipe, is a device specifically made to smoke tobacco. It comprises a chamber (the bowl) for the tobacco from which a thin hollow stem (shank) emerges, ending in a mouthpiece. Pipes can range from very simple machine-made briar models to highly prized hand-made artisanal implements made by renowned pipemakers, which are often very expensive collector's items.

Some cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Americas smoke tobacco in ceremonial pipes, and have done so since long before the arrival of Europeans. For instance the Lakota people use a ceremonial pipe called čhaŋnúŋpa. Other cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Americas smoke tobacco socially. The tobacco plant is native to South America but spread into North America long before Europeans arrived. Tobacco was introduced to Europe from the Americas in the 16th century and spread around the world rapidly.

As tobacco was not introduced to the Old World until the 16th century, the older pipes outside of the Americas were usually used to smoke various other substances, including hashish, a rare and expensive substance outside areas of the Middle East, Central Asia and India, where it was then produced. ^{[citation needed]}

A pipe's fundamental function is to provide a relatively safe, manipulable volume in which to incompletely combust a smokable substance. Typically this is accomplished by connecting a refractory 'bowl' to some sort of 'stem' which extends and may also cool the smoke mixture drawn through the combusting organic mass (see below).

The broad anatomy of a pipe typically comprises mainly the bowl and the stem. The bowl (1) which is the cup-like outer shell, the part hand-held while packing, holding and smoking a pipe, is also the part "knocked" top-down to loosen and release impacted spent tobacco. On being sucked, the general stem delivers the smoke from the bowl to the user's mouth.

Inside the bowl is an inner chamber (2) space holding tobacco pressed into it. This draught hole (3), is for air flow where air has travelled through the tobacco in the chamber, taking the smoke with it, up the shank (4). At the end of the shank, the pipe's mortise (5) and tenon (6) joint is an air-tight, simple connection of two detachable parts where the mortise is a hole met by the tenon, a tight-fitting "tongue" at the start of the stem (7). Known as the bore (10), the inner shaft of this second section stays uniform throughout while the outer stem tapers down to the mouthpiece or bit (8) held in the smoker's teeth, and finally ends in the "lip" (9), attenuated for comfort.

The bowls of tobacco pipes are commonly made of briar wood, meerschaum, corncob, pear-wood, rose-wood or clay. Less common materials include other dense-grained woods such as cherry, olive, maple, mesquite, oak, and bog-wood. Minerals such as catlinite and soapstone have also been used. Pipe bowls are sometimes decorated by carving, and moulded clay pipes often had simple decoration in the mould.

Unusual pipe materials include gourds (as in the famous calabash pipe) and pyrolytic graphite. Metal and glass, seldom used for tobacco pipes, are common for pipes intended for other substances, such as cannabis.