I was looking further into the tonteldoos, and for the first time came across the spelling “tondeldoos”. Google Translate recognizes both as Dutch, but from my search results I suspect that “tondeldoos” is Dutch and “tonteldoos” is Afrikaans, at least typically.
That led immediately to much earlier Dutch forms, going back to at least the late 18th Century, but there are some pictures of originals that look very 20th Century, one of which in particular, in the Amsterdam Pipe Museum, is dated 1870-1910, which I found kind of shocking.
Just thinking it out, though… the Boer Wars lasted until 1899. The Boers were very rural folk and not exactly up on the latest tech, but their tonteldoos examples were definitely manufactured with some machine tech… as were their rifles and many other items, of course, but in the case of the tonteldoos/tondeldoos it seems this ancient bit of survival technology was, in its way, moving right ahead with the times.
The first Zippo was of course right around 1935, and we have very early sort-of-prototypical lighters from WWI. We think of these early cigarette lighters as simple mechanisms, but the “flint” is not really a flint but a tiny ferrocerium rod which takes a fair amount of chemical and industrial infrastructure to manufacture. Despite resemblance to early wheellock gun mechanism it’s much more closely related to early industrial ignitors for natural gas boilers and the like. It really couldn’t have appeared much earlier than it did.
I guess I had just assumed that before that people were using self-striking matches and maybe metal matchsafes, but it seems now that some were still seriously using flint-and-steel into the 20th Century, possibly as late as WWI. Put another way, the same person could easily have been using flint-and-steel daily in one period of his life just as people had been for thousands of years, and maybe 25 years later he was flipping a Zippo.
Wow. Drives home that things were already changing pretty damned fast by then.
Guess I should have learned that lesson- Tom Mix had been a real, no-shit back-in-the-day Texas Ranger and later had fought alongside Teddy Roosevelt, and Wyatt Earp spent part of his later life consulting on cowboy films for Hollywood.
– Robert the Wombat