Puffing Up the Proto Pipe
When it comes to stoner tech, it doesn’t get much more historic than the Proto Pipe. Often referred to as the “Swiss Army knife of paraphernalia,” the Proto Pipe was essentially the first smoking device explicitly designed with the Cannabis consumer in mind.
Early Inspiration
The Proto Pipe is the brainchild of an artist and self-taught machinist from Denver named Phil Jergenson. “As kids, we used to build slot cars,” Phil’s brother Richard recalls. “That’s where we learned how to solder metal, which later became instrumental in birthing the Proto Pipe.”
As a teenager in the late 1960s, Phil got turned on to Cannabis after a neighbor brought some back from a visit to San Francisco. A short time later, while riding a ski lift, Phil had what he calls his “Eureka moment.”
“I was trying to light a pipe … and I realized I didn’t have any of the implements that you needed,” he told the LA Times in 2021. “That’s when I decided I was going to design a pipe.”
The Pipe Dream
At that time, there weren’t many pipes for weed smokers — only pipes made of corn cobs, wood or cheap, screwed-together metal components. With the Space Race and James Bond all the rage, Jergenson aspired to create as cool and futuristic a pipe as possible. As a stoner earning his living drafting detailed architectural models, he was well equipped to do so.
He spent weeks designing what would eventually become his life’s work, then purchased a Swiss tabletop machining device called the Unimat and started making prototypes. At first, he used aluminum but soon realized it didn’t dissipate the heat well, creating a danger of burning your lips. Then, remembering the slot cars of his youth, he shifted to brass, which solved the problem.
With each iteration, he added more features, such as a permanent screen, a swivel bowl lid, a tamper, a steel-tipped poker, a resin trap, and a storage pod to keep your “combustibles” in. Finally, after countless hours, he came up with a device he was satisfied with, called “The Contrivance.”
Proto Pipe Takes Off
With a cool new pipe to sell, all he needed now was to connect with his market. And so, in 1970, Jergenson moved to the counterculture capital of San Francisco to find his fortune. After securing a warehouse in the Mission District, he summoned his brothers, Kent and Richard, to help him get the business off the ground.
The brothers began selling the Contrivance to hippies on the street for five dollars apiece.
But things got off to a rocky start: their drill wasn’t creating precise enough holes, making many of the pipes unsellable. As a result, they didn’t earn enough to cover their expenses and had to get day jobs. For Phil, that unfortunately meant moving down to Fullerton to work a carpentry gig.
After a year or so of lackluster results, Jergenson feared his pipe dream might go up in smoke. Then, in June 1972, he took a gamble and spent $120 to place an ad in an up-and-coming magazine called Rolling Stone. A few months later, their post office box was overflowing with orders. Now living in SoCal, Phil had to take commuter flights up to the Bay to make pipes on weekends. It would take nearly a year before they’d earn enough for Phil to move back to San Fran and make pipes full time.
By 1973, business was so good that they were able to open a second workshop in Berkeley. But the real game changer came in the fall of 1974, with the premiere of High Times magazine. The Jergensons placed an ad for The Contrivance in HT’s second issue (Spring 1975), and the response was so overwhelming that they continued to advertise in the mag for nearly a decade.
Ripoff & Rebranding
One day in 1975, while selling pipes on Telegraph Avenue, Phil was propositioned by a so-called record promoter from SoCal named Israel Juda, who flashed him a briefcase full of cash and made him a dubious offer:
“He said, ‘Look — this is going to go one of several ways,” Richard recounts. “You’re either going to sell me the business for $30,000, or we’re going to be business partners fifty-fifty, or I’m going to make these without you.”
He also had an odd, Andy Warhol-inspired marketing shtick in mind to sell them.
“I’m going to call them The Tomato,” he reportedly pitched. “We’re going to etch the name ‘Tomato’ on the top of the pipe and put ’em in a can with a tomato label on it.”
Hoping to utilize his money rather than get ripped off, Phil reluctantly agreed to bring him on as a partner. A short time later, he showed up at their warehouse with 10,000 cans, which he’d scammed from the American Can Company. However, after Richard met him and talked it over with his brother, they decided to back out of the deal.
Sure enough, about a month later, tomato cans containing cheap forgeries started showing up in shops around the Bay. To counteract these knockoffs, the Jergensons changed their product’s name: One night, a friend who meant to say “prototype pipe” mistakenly called it a “proto pipe,” and the name instantly stuck. They registered the new name and began etching a pair of interlocking “P”s (inspired by the Rolls-Royce logo) onto all of the new Proto Pipes.
They also brought in some more trustworthy partners — including an underground cartoonist named Larry Todd, who’d made a name for himself with his Dr. Atomic comics. Todd helped them rebrand the Proto Pipe by drawing up fun new ads and lending them one of his characters to use as their mascot: a trash can-shaped robot they renamed “Probot.” They even made a life-size Probot costume to promote at trade shows. In fact, at the NY Fashion and Boutique Show in the winter of 1979, Probot became the hit of the show.
“Our timing was perfect because Star Wars had recently come out,” Richard remembers. “Everybody was saying, ‘Look — it’s R2-D2!’ And we were like, ‘No, it’s Probot!”
Drug War Downers
By the early ’80s, Proto Pipe was employing around a dozen staffers and churning out nearly 500 pipes a week. Unfortunately, they were also facing new challenges. First, in 1979, their warehouse in Berkeley was sold, and their rent was doubled overnight. As a result, they moved their operations to a former car dealership in the small Mendocino town of Willits. But apparently, the city council wasn’t too happy with them being there, even though everyone knew the town’s economy was Cannabis-driven.
“We were the only visible tip of the underground economy that was keeping all these communities in Northern California alive for decades … and we weren’t out in the hills — we had a storefront right on Franklin Ave,” Richard explains. “We were harassed, so we ended up moving to another side of town.”
In 1986, President Reagan pushed through the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which, among other things, banned the interstate sale and transportation of drug paraphernalia. Not wanting to end up in prison, the brothers sold the business to a friend named Michael Lightrain in the winter of 1987, with the understanding that whenever legalization came about, they could buy it back. Rebranding it as a tobacco pipe, Lightrain ran the company for the next two decades.
Meanwhile, the Jergensons moved on to other pursuits, founding a “life-sized Erector set” company called Grid Beam. Richard also devoted more time to his other passion: cannthropology. Over the years, he curated thousands of pieces of counterculture memorabilia and artifacts. This impressive collection would eventually inspire the Jergensons to reclaim the brand they built.
Reunion & Reclamation
Fast forward to 2014: After surviving a battle with cancer, Richard was reexamining what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. He thought, “I’ve got this astonishing archive of counterculture material. Why not do something with it?”
Richard contacted Emerald Cup organizers Tim and Taylor Blake, who, after visiting him and seeing his collection, offered him a space at the event that December.
“I invited Phil and Larry, so it was the three horsemen back together again after three decades,” Richard recalls. “We had a great showing. The reception was just fantastic.” Impressed by how legit the Cannabis community had become, the partners were inspired to get back in the game. The only problem was that Lightrain was less than cooperative.
“We had an agreement that when legalization came, we wanted the business back. However, when that day came, the agreement was not honored,” he says.
Unable to reclaim their brand as promised, Phil decided to move forward without the Proto Pipe name, designing a new pipe with a larger, round bowl and other new features, which he dubbed the Mendo Pipe. Lightrain’s mismanagement of the company would soon work in the brothers’ favor.
“He ultimately drove the business into the ground because he was an absentee owner and was never really a part of the culture,” Richard says.
As a result, the company fell into debt, and by 2017, Lightrain was so far behind on the warehouse’s rent that the landlord evicted him and offered the space back to the brothers. Moreover, Lightrain had let the trademark and patent lapse, enabling the brothers to reclaim them. After nearly 30 years, the Jergenson boys finally had their Proto Pipe back.
The Shape of Things to Come
Since then, the Jergensons have rejuvenated the brand, renaming the Mendo Pipe the Proto Pipe Rocket and enlisting Phil’s daughter, Rona, to build their website. The website enabled stoners around the world to access their products and garnered some free marketing, courtesy of an LA Times journalist who wrote a feature on them in 2021. Today, they’re producing about 1,000 pipes a month and have sold more than 1.5 million units worldwide.
“The numbers aren’t quite what they were back in the heady days,” Richard admits. “But the quality of the pipes is off the charts. And everyone is so happy that the founders are back.”
As the company’s official archivist and historian, Richard is working on a book that will tell the full story behind Proto Pipe’s colorful history — one that, as a fellow cannthropologist, I look forward to reading someday.