An early advertising campaign for the Zippo, which George G. Blaisdell began producing in 1933 in Bradford, Pennsylvania, featured a young lady lighting a cigarette while leaning into a wind so strong it molded her dress to her body. Later ads made a stronger case for “matchless performance,” including one about Sgt. John Nappi’s Zippo, which flared faithfully throughout a 1969 typhoon on Okinawa.

 

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An early advertising campaign for the Zippo, which George G. Blaisdell began producing in 1933 in Bradford, Pennsylvania, featured a young lady lighting a cigarette while leaning into a wind so strong it molded her dress to her body. Later ads made a stronger case for “matchless performance,” including one about Sgt. John Nappi’s Zippo, which flared faithfully throughout a 1969 typhoon on Okinawa. Another told how Marineland of Florida’s chief diver, Tom DeVoe, accidentally dropped his Zippo into a tank of aggressive giant sea turtles, who “chewed, slammed, mauled and battered” it. The factory fixed it for free, as it has done with every broken one ever returned to Bradford, where Zippos are still made.

 

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Reliable windproof operation and durability made Zippos essential equipment for GIs in World War II. Beginning in the 1950s, another company’s ad campaign made the Zippo image as indelible as a tattoo. The Marlboro man, the most famous advertising character of his era, used one. The scores of movie stars who have ignited Zippos on the screen started with the Marx Brothers (though by that time the similarly named Zeppo had retired from the act).

One ad headlined “278 Movies. 0 Facelifts” hammered home a remarkable point: Zippos that have survived the ravages of time are nearly identical to those made today. Just 2 of the lighter’s 22 original parts have been modified.

 

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More than 400,000 varieties of Zippos have been produced, and their longevity has helped keep prices for many vintage examples under $25. Models that saw service in Vietnam fall into a special collecting category and are frequently engraved with owners’ names, tour-of-duty dates, maps, military insignias, even pithy bits of wisdom (“Fighter by Day / Lover by Night / Drunkard by Choice / Army by Mistake,” one reads). These tend to sell for around $200, but a few fetch upward of $350. Highly select examples from the 1930s and 1940s can command prices above $500, according to Russell E. Lewis, a writer on collectibles who monitored nearly 9,000 Zippo sales on eBay during a 30-day period in 2003.

Resources

Lewis’s book Zippo Lighters: An Identification and Price Guide , a 2004 Krause Publications paperback that sells