Is this an early Louis Orlik cased briar?

[jpmcwjr]

Below are the pipes from condorlover's link to an eBay auction.
Bet the set of seven goes for a bit more (7x-20x) than $160, the bid at at 7:05:33 PM PdT on Tuesday, August 21, 2018.

 

[osiris01]

Well, waking up this morning and the lid had been well and truly lifted on the pipe. Thank you all so much for your contributions and, as always, it is always an educational experience.
The trouble is when you research something like this on the internet, you inevitably unearth dozens of 'documents' that have all plagiarized the same source - I can't remember how many 'potted histories' I have read, all of which reproduced sources like Pipedia practically word for word, each one filling in a bit more space. JGuss: your reply does not do this and it answers so many questions that have arisen as a result of me believing what I read. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your knowledge (which I know from experience must have been hard earned).
It's funny you mention the dating of the '1908' meer. As soon as Jesse mentioned it, it was gnawing away at me. It was the evidence that was skewing the result - if you discard it, things fall into place, as JGuss has so eloquently shown. I don't have the full image, but from what I can see, it is not even hallmarked, so how it was dated at 1908 is beyond me and, not that statistics are my thing at all, but if you use bad data, you'll get a bad result.
So, thank you all for your interest and contributions - it hasn't just filled in the gaps, it has build a new extension.
Cheers,
Geoff

 

[sablebrush52]

Jon was just doing a quick job. Had he had the time, he could have told you not only what month Alfred first landed in New York, but the day, hour, minutes, and seconds, how he was attired and who he stole it from, where he got his first meal, how much he tipped, whether he thought that American beer tasted better than horse piss, and who he landed on.

 

[osiris01]

You do realise that Jon's inbox is now about to be inundated (don't worry, Jon, I'll behave). However, I can make a fairly decent guess on the American beer - proper beer is warm and flat, and the really proper stuff you have to filter through your teeth before you swallow. However, I have so far resisted the urge to drink horse piss, so I can't make an objective statement.
Joking aside, it highlights the effort and time required to know this stuff - I'm fairly decent at research, but it took the best part of 2 weeks for me to just identify the thing, and then I needed to ask for confirmation (and Jesse, I've dragged you down this path before with Barlings). So it really is hats off to you guys, not just for the level of knowledge, but the willingness to share it.

 

[jguss]

Jon was just doing a quick job. Had he had the time, he could have told you not only what month Alfred first landed in New York, but the day, hour, minutes, and seconds, how he was attired and who he stole it from, where he got his first meal, how much he tipped, whether he thought that American beer tasted better than horse piss, and who he landed on.

Alfred's first visit to America was on the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse which departed Southampton on February 24, 1904 and docked in NYC on March 1 at precisely 10:45am. The morning was blustery, with snow flurries in the air (an inch was to fall over the course of the day) and a high temperature of 37 degrees. The ship was a trifle late. It's Captain had consumed quantities of sherry at breakfast inordinate even by Edwardian standards, and there was a slight mishap involving the sinking of a tender in the harbor.
Alfred was, as usual, attired in a black frock coat. He looked something like a louche version of Viscount Grey of Fallodon. It was in fact from Grey that Alfred had stolen the garment after an all-night session of whist at the Reform Club.
Alfred's first stop after debarking and clearing customs and immigration was to get lunch at nearby Fraunces Tavern. There he ate six dozen oysters washed down with madeira; he abhorred beer. Alfred deliberately failed to tip, thinking it a sure sign of the arriviste. Generally speaking he found everything and everyone in America to exhibit signs of the arriviste. Although he found this anathema on this, his first sojourn to the United States, as you know Alfred eventually embraced our way of life and made America his home.

 

[osiris01]

:clap:
I think you've just given me a hernia.

 

[jguss]

The trouble is when you research something like this on the internet, you inevitably unearth dozens of 'documents' that have all plagiarized the same source - I can't remember how many 'potted histories' I have read, all of which reproduced sources like Pipedia practically word for word, each one filling in a bit more space.

Geoff, you raise a host of interrelated and very interesting questions about the nature of research and the role of the internet. I can't possibly address them all, or even some of them, in a forum post, but I do want to spend a moment giving my two cents. Pipedia is a wonderful resource. It is, and deserves to be, the first stop in any effort to learn about pipe history. In many cases it also deserves to be the last stop. I can't praise highly enough the work that Scott Thile, Jesse, and a host of others have done to make Pipedia what it is today.
Having said that, it is inevitable that in trying to cover so much ground errors will accumulate. This is, I think, particularly inherent in the nature of the internet. Easy access to information means that false or misleading statements are just as likely to be perpetuated as true ones; maybe more likely. The internet allows transmission errors to occur on a fantastic scale that dwarfs the problems faced by researchers a generation ago.
For most people research is what they can google in a brief span of time; what it often amounts to is quickly locating someone else's opinions and/or research, almost always unsourced. Maybe the more motivated will attempt to weigh the contradictory versions of events that they find and reason out which is more likely to be true. Often that's enough, but often it's not. I guess it depends on how important it is to you that the "answer" be right. Primary research, by comparison, takes everything with a large grain of salt until proven by one or more (hopefully contemporaneous) sources. It's improbably hard work, and involves the expenditure of much time, money, effort & ingenuity. I recognize that this is a pretty high bar, and one only likely to be attempted on a hobby basis by people with a personality disorder or who have too much time on their hands (not sure which category I fall into; my wife would probably say the former).
Why does any of this matter? In the larger scheme of things it probably doesn't. But in a field like ours, where true scholarship is vanishingly rare (and I don't put myself in that category), much of what we think we know is mere repetition and distortion. In my mgmt consulting days we called this "drinking our own bathwater". Or as you said in your comment: bad data, bad result.

 

[paulfg]

jguss +1

much of what we think we know is mere repetition and distortion.

 

[osiris01]

Now you're getting deep and I agree with everything you have said. But before I get into theory, I want to say that I am a huge fan of Pipedia and it is my first stop, almost always, and I certainly didn't mean any disrespect to those who dedicate precious time to it. It is a fantastic resource.
Eons ago when I did my degree, the internet was in its infancy and people just didn't have personal computers. I used libraries and books and the only time I used a computer was to type my thesis. Since then I have done, and am continuing, to study post-grad. I look back and wonder how on earth I managed without Google. The nature of research has changed; in some ways for the better, and in other ways, for the worse. But it has changed completely. My degree was in philosophy which is not a research-based subject in that as long as you can apply valid logic to an argument, any old crap will do (and in my case, did); my post grad stuff is in ancient studies, specifically Egypt and the Middle East, which is decidedly research-based.
Absolutely agree with your comments on primary research, and I think this is where the internet has made the most significant impact. I can now spend a week raking up old PhD thesis (or theses to be technically correct), getting ideas, studying bibliographies, looking for sources etc. But if I turned up to a supervision with primary research, I'd be sent down. Primary research is just that - it is effectively pre-research. Once you have completed primary research, for me at least, the internet plays a limited role. It's back to the library (sometimes on another continent) to determine if your primary research has uncovered resources that can be verified. And that is where the hard work begins. As you know, it is 95% looking for verification; if it can't be verified with other methods of research (in my case, looking at translations of translations, spending days translating 4000 year old documents to find that they are account ledgers) then it amounts to nothing. A good example is Champollion who first translated hieroglyphs. Until he found the Rosetta stone (which actually was an account ledger), his efforts were all primary research - nothing could be verified.
I'm starting to babble, so I'll conclude. The internet has made primary research easy in some ways, but in others, it has made it considerably more complicated. We now have so much primary research material that, unless you go back to good ol' fashioned scholarship, your research means nothing, because, as you have said, minor inaccuracies become major inaccuracies, which ultimately become 'truths'.
And so it is with history (perhaps more so than any other subject). I'm willing to bet an Ashton that your knowledge has been obtained by going over original catalogues, manifests, receipts, invoices, genealogy charts etc. etc. And the 1908 meerschaum is an excellent example. Had I attempted to validate that research, I would have discarded it because of the discrepancy. I spent a couple of weeks on this pipe, on and off. Yes, it was time and effort, but it was still primary research. To achieve an accurate understanding, primary research is never enough. I was lucky in that people who had done the hard stuff (the secondary research and validation): you, Jesse, et al, were happy to share that knowledge with me.
Paul has just given another prime example with his Triumph. The larger the role the internet plays, the more necessary skepticism becomes.

 

[osiris01]

...and just to add, it is often the original source that gets the blame for the hyperbole of others. And the real shame is that these people that do the work in the first place are becoming increasing (and very understandably) unwilling to publish because of this. In time, instead of a positive web presence, any presence may well be bad presence. Perhaps.
Who knows: maybe in 10 years, the internet will contain nothing but crap, ads, and 'dating' sites that studious people would only visit as a last resort (and go back to the good old days of books, libraries, and parchment).
(BTW, I'm 407 years old next week)

 

[sablebrush52]

Who knows: maybe in 10 years, the internet will contain nothing but crap, ads, and 'dating' sites that studious people would only visit as a last resort (and go back to the good old days of books, libraries, and parchment).

The Internet is pretty close to that now. And to be fair, it's developed a little bit since the days when the only profitable sites were porn sites funded by investor groups made up of dentists.
The best sources for learning about pipe history are those surviving records, journals, advertisements and such ephemerata that have somehow survived. I've tried, as much as possible, to document the info that I share. And the Internet provides other resources, like eBay, where one can pull together a large archive of useful images over a period of years. They're all dips in the river. The more dips, the better the picture of the river gets.

 

[osiris01]

Oh, absolutely. This is about as close to social media as I get, but no internet - I'd be lost. My daily average of Google searches must be in the 100s. I don't own a television, so I use Netflix, I get the news, the weather, the list goes on. I guess what I'm saying is that the more one uses unverified data, the more discretion one has to use when making conclusions. An example is the Pipedia article on Orlik. The writer states quite clearly that he/she doesn't know the relationship between Alfred and Louis and suggests it might be father and son. A heck of a large chunk of articles/ebay listings etc. I've read when researching this pipe state, with authority and certainty, that Alfred is the son of Louis (there may well have been a son named Alfred, but it isn't this one). This is not an issue with Pipedia; the writer does exactly what they should have done. But, as has been pointed out here, Pipedia is the first place to look, but you can't stop there and claim knowledge; you do as you say Jesse, and look to the historical record, be it books, birth certificates, or genealogy charts.
For me, professionally and privately, the internet has considerably more going for it than against and I wouldn't do without it, but you need to make sure the river you're seeing is the right one.

 

[mso489]

I'd be too over-awed to smoke these historical masterworks. They are impressive, to say the least. That's a striking lithe long-stemmed marvel. Two dozen for ten bucks, but those are't today's ten spots either.

 

[osiris01]

:lol: I haven't even put a bowl through it yet. There's a fine line: whilst I'd normally agree that an unsmoked pipe is just a paperweight, does the same apply to a pipe with historical value? It's a tough call and I guess it depends on the purpose for which one bought it. It's not a museum piece (although if I keep it in its case much longer, it might be), but it does have value - it the product of a situation and environment that is alien and that very few know about - more now that Jon, et al, have contributed, of course.
As I mentioned above, I can't afford to collect pipes, but I get as much pleasure from buying them as I do from smoking them. I have a Paypal kitty - I buy interesting pipes that I can research, examine, learn from, smoke, and restore. When I'm done, I'll sell it in order to buy the next one. I normally have a few on the go at once, and it often pays for my tobacco. But this one will be a wrench. I suspect that I've got at least a few more weeks with it.
But the 2 dozen for $10 did make me laugh. A little while back, I worked out what 12 shillings would be in 1930 and it came to about 80GBP. So dial that back 10 years, this pipe went for 7 1/2 shillings, so that would probably work out at about 50GBP. That's the cased price. The case is croc leather. If, today, you bought a pipe and a croc case for 50 quid, it would be a scam. I've approximated, but even leaving room for bad maths (or math - never really worked that one out), life now is comprehensively different. And it is that, that fascinates me.