h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I wonder if the hookah and the modern day bong are related. They certainly do the same thing - pull the smoke through water to cool it. Did some ingenious hippy decide to recreate a 'baby-hookah' and the bong was born?

I find it hard to believe that it wouldn't be based on the hookah when its such a long established peice of smoking equipment.

Exactly how does one go about discovering that drawing smoke through water leads to the hookah experience anyway? lol

I was told many years ago that the bong was the result of crossfertilisation between the hookah and the Jefferson Airplane. "What's a Jefferson Airplane?" I hear you cry, "I thought it was a 60s acid rock band."

I'm not recommending that anybody try this, in fact I recommend you don't - it's not big, and it's not clever, and you could have somebody's eye out. I am merely reporting events as they may or may not have happened.

A Jefferson Airplane was a cardboard tube, say from a kitchen roll or a toilet roll. Originally this would have a small hole pierced in the side, and a joint would be placed in the hole. The smoker would place his/her hand over the end of the tube and inhale. When the tube was full of smoke, he/she would remove their hand and get a big lungful of smoke - hence very stoned very fast. Somebody had the bright idea of standing such a tube on end, replacing the joint with a pipe bowl and stem, and filling the bottom of the tube with water. I presume they didn't use cardboard.

It's probably an urban myth - dope-smokers are arguably more prone to them then anybody else, but it's a nice story. I have to say as an aging hippy that in my younger and more chemically imbalanced days my friends and I were very ingenious and loved creating devices for getting ourselves chemically imbalanced in new and interesting ways. The pipework from the back of an old fridge, with pipe bowl and stem added, and immersed in a tank of water which was then frozen was probably our maddest moment. It tasted foul.

Hah! That brought back a few memories. It is how strange that at a certain time in one's life you experiment with as many weird and wonderful ways to smoke anything that burns. I remember smoking tea leaves once, and of course banana peel. And why a bucket full of water and a bottle sawn in half was a good idea, I can't remember.

Silly. Very silly indeed. Still, didn't do me any madage.