by Ken Johnstone

Created on: June 02, 2009   Last Updated: June 13, 2009

My cigarette lighter of choice right throughout my life has been a Zippo. I hate matches, as they leave you with that horrible taste of sulphur in your mouth. Likewise, I resent paying out good money for these horrible disposable gas lighters that cost about half a pence to make out in Taiwan or China, and then sell everywhere in the West for about 6,000% profit.

I bought my very first Zippo lighter way back in the early 1960s when I was just a wee kid of about thirteen. (That's when I started smoking!) Since then I must have owned about six or seven at various times of my life, for the simple reason that I'm a absentminded kind of fellow, and have a habit of leaving them lying behind me. I received a present of a beautiful, inscribed, 22 Carat gold Zippo from my late parents for my 21st birthday back in 1972, and promptly left it behind me in a pub about a month later. (Gone, never to be seen again, needless to say!) I've never really invested in a very expensive model since, and tend to stick to the plain stainless steel versions. My latest lighter was bought on our recent family holiday in Italy at the beginning of June, and cost me all of 17 Euro in a tobacconists in Rome.

Zippo lighters are the "old-fashioned" petrol variety. They were the brainchild of an American called George G. Blaisdell, who founded the Zippo company way back in 1932 in Bradford, Pennsylvania. He'd bought the patent rights to a similar lighter manufactured in Austria, and then redesigned it to his own specifications. His idea was to produce a cigarette lighter that would look good, and at the same time be simple and easy to use. He called it a "Zippo" because he liked another new product that was invented about the same time, the zipper.

Blaisdell's motto was, in his own words, to "build your product with integrity... stand behind it 100% and success will follow."

It's a formula that worked well for him down through the years, and even today the business is owned and run by two of his family. Blaisdell got his first big break with the onset of the Second World War, when the American armed forces issued a Zippo lighter to every serviceman. In fact, from 1943 until the end of the war, his entire production was purchased exclusively by the American Government! The company has never looked back since.

The Zippo has a pull out inner section that is packed with cotton wool and a wick, where you put the petrol. A simple spring mechanism holds the flint, which provides the spark to ignite

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