“If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth” – Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda & Public Enlightenment.
“Truth isn’t truth” – Rudolph Giuliani, Mayor of the City of New York.
It’s been remarked by a number of people that those who collect one area of antiques will often branch out into other areas. Typically, for guys, at least, these areas are:
- Fountain pens and related accessories.
- Watches and/or clocks, and related accessories.
- Knives, and related accessories.
- Lighters, and related accessories.
Basically, this theory states that if you’re interested in one of those areas, you’re likely to be interested in at least one of the other three areas. Shamefully for me – I’m interested in all four of those areas. So I’m screwed right off the bat! Haha…
Aaanyway. Enough of that. I am creating this posting for the very real purpose of it being a public service to the collecting community, and the subject of this posting is, as the title says: IMCO lighters! Or specifically, one particular IMCO lighter, which I’ll be talking about later on.
OK. So What is “IMCO”?
Most people in lighter-collecting circles will likely have heard of IMCO, and if you haven’t, here’s a brief introduction:
IMCO was an Austrian manufacturer of cigarette lighters. Established in 1907 by Julius Meister, who was formerly a manufacturer of brass buttons for the Austro-Hungarian Army. Unable to make much money just from making buttons, Meister struck on the idea of manufacturing something that everybody would need, and that everybody would use – not just the army. And that something was the newfangled ‘cigarette lighter’.
Cigarette lighters as we recognise them today were invented in the late 1800s. Early models were unbelievably crude by modern standards, but IMCO got the idea that if they could come up with one good, cheap, simple design, then they could mass produce them, and become the Henry Ford Company of cigarette lighters!
Of course, for the lighters to be cheap enough for everybody to afford them, they had to keep costs down. So that meant that they needed a cheap, readily available source of metal. This wasn’t easy in the 1910s, when Austria-Hungary was fighting with Germany and Turkey, against Russia, France, Belgium, Britain, Canada, and the United States! Any plans to start manufacturing lighters during the First World War were quickly shelved as being wholly impractical. It wasn’t until after the war in 1919, and 1920, that IMCO actually began manufacturing.
The IMCO ‘Trench Lighter’
Due to the restraints of the First World War, IMCO couldn’t actually start making lighters in the 1910s. When the war ended in 1918, the need for flashy brass buttons for the army suddenly ended, and IMCO was groping around to try and find something else to manufacture. In 1920, the first IMCO lighter was released.
In the days before stainless steel, a lot of metal products were made of brass, because of its ability to resist rusting and most forms of corrosion. The biggest source of brass in Austria at the time was the millions and millions and MILLIONS of leftover shell-casings from the First World War.
Now, whether or not IMCO ever used these casings in their ‘raw’ form to make their first lighters is unknown. Going by photographs I’ve seen, I would say that it was very unlikely. It is possible that they simply used the brass bullet-casings, melted them down and remade the reclaimed metal into the necessary parts they needed, but didn’t use the actual casings themselves to manufacture the lighters.
So, what’s the deal here?
The ‘deal’ is that almost every single one of these lighters – be they originals from the 1920s, or (much more common), reproductions made in China or elsewhere – are always sold as ‘trench’ lighters, a moniker which is not only massively misleading, but also blatantly incorrect, for reasons I will explain below.
What is a ‘Trench Lighter’?
A ‘trench’ lighter is a type of ‘trench art’. ‘Trench art’ is anything decorative or functional, handmade by soldiers while out in the fields or in the trenches during battle, or by soldiers recuperating or on-leave from the battlefront, using materials scavenged or saved or found on the battlefield. Usually such items are things like shell casings, bullet-casings, and metal from food tins or cans of meat and so on.
For something to qualify as ‘trench art’, it has to have been made by a soldier during either the First or the Second World War, while on the front lines (or while on active duty during the wars) using materials available on the battlefield.
That means that for the IMCO lighter to be a REAL ‘trench’ lighter, it would have to have been made out of actual battlefield materials. Which it never was. Even if the brass which was used to manufacture it came from old shell-casings that were melted down and reused, that doesn’t constitute a trench lighter, since it wasn’t made by a soldier on active duty during the war, out of actual field materials. That’s not to say that actual trench lighters don’t exist – they certainly do – but the IMCO lighter from 1920 is not one of them.
Where does this whole thing come from?
If it’s not a trench lighter, and was never used in the First World War, and wasn’t even manufactured until at least a year or two after the war ended, then why is it even called a trench lighter? Where did it come from!?
Honestly, I have no idea. But it perplexed, and later, perturbed me, that so many people were being unknowingly and unwillingly conned or misled into thinking that they were buying some sort of legitimate and original First World War cigarette lighter made on the Western Front or in the trenches or something. The sheer QUANTITY of these so-called ‘handmade’, ‘homemade’ lighters, supposedly produced out of stuff they found lying around in the trenches, should alone, make it a suspect piece, to say nothing of the fact that they all look exactly the same.
Are Soldiers’ Cigarette Lighters a Thing?
Did soldiers in the First World War ever make their own trench-art lighters out of scraps of brass and copper that they found lying around in the trenches, probably while in hospital or on leave, to kill time and have something to do?
Probably, yeah! Some genuine examples certainly do exist. But what was far more common was for established companies to actually manufacture lighters specially for the armed forces (no, the IMCO lighter isn’t one of these, either. Sorry, folks). Many of these were made during the Second World War. The most common models were the Dunhill Service Lighter, and the venerable ZIPPO lighter.
During the conflict, ZIPPO ceased manufacturing lighters for the civilian market, and sold exclusively to the armed forces. Because brass was required for the war-effort, wartime Zippos were made exclusively of steel – the first, last and only time in their history when the lighter wasn’t made of brass (except of course, for when it was made of silver or gold).
Another example is what is known as the ‘foxhole’ or ‘sailor’s lighter. This consists of a flint-tube with striking wheel, and an adjacent tube through which a thick match-cord or rope has been passed. Striking the flint-wheel causes sparks to land on the frayed end of the match-cord.
Blowing gently on the captured sparks creates the necessary heat to ignite the rope, creating an ember. This ember can be used to light a cigarette or start a fire. Since it doesn’t require lighter fluid and doesn’t actually create a flame, the ‘foxhole’ lighter was popular with sailors, soldiers and campers, and anybody else who might need to start a fire without the aid of combustibles, matches or a conventional cigarette lighter.
Concluding Remarks
In closing – is the original IMCO lighter a ‘trench’ lighter? No. It never was, and it never will be. It doesn’t fulfill a single one of the aforementioned prerequisites to be called a ‘trench’ lighter. It wasn’t made of bullet-casings, artillery-shells or other scrap metal found in the trenches, it wasn’t manufactured by soldiers during combat, and it wasn’t even manufactured by IMCO until two years AFTER the war was over.
If that’s the case, then why do people think it is? I honestly don’t know. As for why it’s still WIDELY manufactured (literally – you can buy one off of eBay right now for next to nothing), I don’t know. IMCO folded in 2012, but this peculiar, fascinating, quirky little lighter, now coming up to 100 years old, continues to be loved, appreciated and admired. I think part of it is the sheer novelty aspect of it, as well as people’s mistaken belief in its fraudulent history.
Is it Possible to Buy an ORIGINAL IMCO lighter from the 20s?
Sure! They ain’t easy to find, but yes, you can buy them. They pop up on eBay from time to time. The original IMCO lighters (as opposed to the reproduction ‘trench’ lighters) are marked on the flint-tube with “MADE IN AUSTRIA”, and the sliding windshield is stamped with “IMCO” and the relevant patent numbers in very snazzy Art-Deco style font. Most of these lighters date to the mid 1920s.
My first notice of this style being sold circa 1990 or so was indeed marketed as a WWI or trench lighter, but presumably this is, as you say, false history where it suits the mental imagery so well that fact is secondary.
The same catalog, if memory serves correctly, labeled these as “Allies” and the more modern and art deco IMCO Triplex as an “Axis” lighter.
I remember whispers of people saying that this was ‘fake history’ and so I was determined to find out. Then one day I stumbled across photos of an original from the 1920s. I looked up IMCO’s website and history of its lighter-designs and the answer was literally staring me in the face. I dunno why people haven’t figured it out before now, or why this stupid myth persists! It’s obviously not true. It took me ten minutes of online research to prove it false.
I am interested in the pronunciation and spelling of your last name. Mine is Schoening an Americanization to be sure. Originally spelled with an umlaut. I have seen ancestor head stones in Dayton Ohio spelled Schuning.
For someone who “honestly doesn’t know” you sure do seem to have a giant chip (or rather block) on your shoulder about this. You define “Trench Art” and then say it’s not a “Trench Lighter” but you don’t seem to notice the terms are not congruent at all other than the word “trench”. Well, we have a Trench Coat and I don’t think it was invented by people in the trenches in WWI, but rather a couple of decades earlier and the name “trench coat” defines its use thereof. In other words, “trench” is a descriptive term to describe a possible function, not a claim of being “trench art”.
The so-called Trench Lighter could be used in trench warfare and if they had used trenches to any extent in WWII, they probably would have. Given the design for the “trench lighter” existed in 1910 (even if not implemented), the mere idea that trenches had nothing to do with them when they were based on the idea of a lighter that would have worked well had it been implemented in trench warfare for possible future warfare is more absurd than your notion that they apparently just made the name up. I’ve seen no claims that “Trench lighters” are “trench art” any more than “Trench Coats” are “Trench Art” (Trench Coats were pre-existing but not referred to as such until that time and not made by soldiers out of materials found on the battlefield). So should they not have been called trench coats when they were used in trenches? WHO CARES!? It’s a name.
[…] more on the trench lighter HERE and […]
That Goebbels quote is often misunderstood as him outlining how the Reich would “trick” people into following them. This is incorrect and is intentionally used out of context.
The context is: Goebbels was saying this about the (often Jewish-run) media in Germany at the time. The newspapers were telling big lies and hoping they would become truth by virtue of repetition. Exactly how the (often Jewish-run) media today works
Aside from the mythologized origin story, I think some of us at least are intrigued by the esthetics of these little machines. It is maybe similar to the attraction of, say, manual typewriters, fountain pens, or Peterson pipes. (Full disclosure: I’ve long been interested in lighters of this sort but have never had one.)
I believe there is another chapter to this story, by the way. Didn’t the Bowers Company in Kalamazoo make similar lighters from some time in the 1930s into the ’50s?
http://www.lighterlibrary.com/kalamazoowindprooflighter.php
I ran across too one from Kalamazoo and one from Austria as well as two other lighters that were manufactured in St Thomas Ontario Canada they all function but I don’t know what kind of fluid to put in them. I also don’t want them I want to sell them. But I have no idea where or who would buy them?