Peterson of Dublin

Peterson's origins run back to 1865, when German immigrant brothers Friedrich and Heinrich Kapp opened a pipe-making shop, Kapp Brothers, on Grafton Street in Dublin, working in meerschaum and briar root. Charles Peterson later brought the brothers a pipe design of his own and proposed a partnership; the firm was renamed Kapp & Peterson and went on to patent, in 1890, the reservoir-and-bore "System" pipe design that still carries the Peterson name. The company is described by pipe-trade sources as the oldest continuously operating briar pipe factory in the world, and today Peterson trades from a retail shop at 48-49 Nassau Street, Dublin 2.

The Nassau Street premises sells Peterson's own pipe lines, including the System, Aran, Sherlock Holmes and Donegal Rocky ranges, together with pipe accessories. Peterson's own site states that its silversmiths, who fit the sterling-silver bands used on many of the firm's pipes, train in-house through an apprenticeship the company describes as lasting four to eight years, and that the wider production tradition is passed down within the workshop across generations of pipe-makers.

Peterson's System design introduced a moisture-wicking reservoir and graduated internal bore intended to keep the smoke channel drier, an engineering approach that distinguished it from standard briar pipes of the period and that the company continues to manufacture using the same underlying patent principle.