BLOW POKES HISTORY

Blow Pokes were first sold through a few specialty retailers. Their marketing appears non-existant. And the timing coincided with the arrival of new home heating technologies from gas and oil controlled by thermostats taking over for coal and wood. This probably blunted the need many had for a new wood burning firetool.

I learned that after the 1941 US Patent expired around 1960, the original Blo-Poke was “copied” by others in the fireplace industry. Using overseas contract manufacturing has become the usual way sellers obtain their products.

• Brass blow pokes are being replicated by brass foundry companies that also market and sell a wide variety of brass items; many of which are often made to look like “Antiques”.
• Brass Blow Poke “Knock-Offs” are currently imported from India, Taiwan and China for sale in the US.
• The design of blow pokes is basically unchanged in the 75 years since its introduction. The big exception is the tiny tip. The 5/8″ tall poke-fin gives way to a range of other “plug-in” poke tips.
• The “solid brass” construction and 4-foot length meant they are relatively heavy, and need two hands to hold and poke.

The main innovation at that time was the marketing of the Blow Poker – with an “r”. Two fireplace industry wholesalers imported less expensive, rustic looking black Blow Pokers. These had more useful looking poker tips, the kind that you’d associate with fire pokers.

• More conventional looking poker tips appear more helpful.
• But AIR BLOWING Performance appears to be a low priority (small blow holes).
• Some low-cost blow pokers even left off the mouthpiece entirely.
• “Rustic” seems to mean low tech production, and low-cost materials.
• Again, these are also 4-feet long , heavy and require 2 hands to hold and poker

Brass Blowpokes and Black Blowpokers were both offered by Fireplace Dealers in the 70’s and 80’s. But dealers told me they were never big sellers. Frankly, I don’t think most dealers did a good job selling them. Blowpokes didn’t fit into fireplace tool sets. Bright brass went out of fashion. And some of the rustic blowpokers were a bit too shoddy and poor performing for many  customers.

That’s the market we found when we began building blowpokers. We saw there might be an opportunity to offer better AIR BLOWING Performance – with a better poker tip – plus easy 1-hand handling, which no one else was making.We also found that almost everyone who tried, preferred shorter than 4-feet long.

Lately interest in blowpokes has grown. It appears to be a combination of

• the boom in retail internet sales,
• and with the growing popularity of fire pits – from small table tops and kettles to big in-ground fire pits.
• And recently we’ve noticed new buyers searches with new names for the blowpoke. New names invented by people who may have seen one in use or heard about it, but didn’t catch the name. Names like fireplace blower tools, firestick blowers, and firepipe pokers.
• Another new name is FireDragon, the 36″ import from China with the low cost, 2-part soldered brass mouthpiece.
• The FireDragon, although shorter than most, appeared only on Amazon. And it was priced at roughly half the price of other blowpokes.

That’s part of the reason Vineyard Firetools now offers an even lower priced 36″ blowpoker. We’ve come to recognize that size as a new category, just like all of the solid brass 4-footers with small poke tips from various makers are in a “class”

With all that activity, it seem like there should be a lot more blow pokes around. But with more than a decade of experience making and selling blow pokes, I am constantly surprised. Most people – even experienced wood burners – have never seen or used one, even in the New England area. And more broadly across the country, very few Americans have even heard of “blow pokes”, much less know what they can do.

I suspect this had to do with the fact that by the time this was invented, America had moved past wood burning for home heating and had entered the fossil fuel age. We were heating homes with coal, oil, gas and electric baseboard heaters. Wood fires became more of a holiday tradition for most families with fireplaces.

And later in the 1970’s with the Arab Oil Embargo, wood stoves became a huge craze and took over many fireplaces with their claim of efficiency. That efficiency, along with regulations favoring lower emissions has led to expensive permits and zoning restrictions on new construction, and fewer open fireplaces. And the fireplace industry also led the charge with their effort to convert fireplaces from natural wood to “clean gas” and fake-log fires. And the introducion of pellet stoves which operate mechanically.