The History of Zippo

This article summarizes Zippo Manufacturing Company’s published history. It is not a museum catalog, and the pictures on this website are not archival photographs.

Bradford, 1932

George G. Blaisdell founded Zippo Manufacturing Company in Bradford, Pennsylvania, in 1932. Zippo’s history says that he watched a friend struggle with a cumbersome Austrian lighter and set out to make one a person could open and light with one hand. He kept a chimney around the flame, put the works in a rectangular case, and hinged the lid.

He named it Zippo because he liked the sound of the word zipper. The first lighter was produced in 1933. Zippo says it sold for $1.95 and carried his promise: “It works or we fix it free.” The patent application was filed on May 17, 1934, and U.S. patent 2,032,695 was granted on March 3, 1936. Zippo says that first 1933 lighter is on display at the Zippo/Case Museum in Bradford.

Within two years, Kendall Oil in Bradford ordered 500 lighters with its own mark. Zippo credits that order as the start of its specialty-advertising and licensing business. That is the same idea behind the licensed designs a retailer sells today: the lighter is a Zippo, and the artwork is an official license, not an unofficial copy.

The war years

After the United States entered World War II, Zippo says it stopped making lighters for the consumer market and sent its production to American servicemembers. Brass was rationed, so the wartime case was steel. Paint was baked on to protect that steel. Collectors know the result as the Black Crackle finish. Zippo’s account says servicemembers scratched names, dates, and places into that coating, and that the company kept repairing lighters without charge.

Zippo has described the wartime lighter as something servicemembers asked post exchanges to stock. This shop does not publish individual wartime diaries. A separate Veterans section will wait until authentic, documented stories and photographs are available.

After the war

Civilian production returned when the war ended. Zippo’s timeline marks the decades that followed with objects a collector can still identify. The Slim lighter and the bottom date code arrived in the 1950s. Zippo says the date code began as quality control: a mark on the bottom so the factory could trace a repair. From the mid-1950s those stamps have let collectors date most lighters. Earlier lighters, from 1933 into the 1950s, are identified by case style and by patent or patent-pending marks.

Zippo dates its script logo to the late 1940s, phased onto the bottom stamp around 1955, with a later redraw incorporated in 1980. In the 1960s the company notes the concert custom of raising a lit Zippo. The shape of the lighter received a U.S. trademark in 2002, and Zippo says the sound of the click was trademarked in 2018.

By Zippo’s count the factory passed 500 million lighters in its 80th anniversary year, 2012, and produced the 600 millionth lighter on June 3, 2020. The company still describes its windproof lighters as American made in Bradford.

What Blazing Laser sells

A genuine Zippo in this shop is the Bradford lighter, sold with Zippo’s own lifetime guarantee. Licensed artwork is artwork Zippo has licensed. Engraving done by Blazing Laser is work performed in New Hampshire on that lighter. It is not a second, imitation lighter, and it is not a claim that Zippo engraved it at the factory.

Sources

Illustrations elsewhere on this website are workshop scenes made for the storefront. They are not photographs from 1932, from wartime, or from Zippo's factory archive.