ANOTHER LIGHTER: Bradford was the home of another cigarette lighter company a few years before George Blaisdell founded Zippo Manufacturing Co. in 1932.

We all know that Zippo became the juggernaut of the lighter world, but little history has survived on the New Method Manufacturing Co., which made a lighter it claimed would not blow out in the wind and was “self-starting.”

Curtis Shilling ran across an ad for the company in which it was seeking agents to sell the lighter and offering $20 a day to show the “Mystery Lighter” to men. 

The ad was in the January 1929 issue of Fur-Fish-Game magazine that was one of a stack of the outdoors magazine he purchased at an antique store. The magazine, in operation since 1925, describes itself as “The magazine for practical outdoorsmen.”

What caught Curtis’ eye was the claim that the lighter “stays lit in the strongest wind,” he said. That claim, of course, is reminiscent of Zippo’s windproof reputation.

Curtis wondered whether New Method Manufacturing might have been related to Zippo in some way, but Linda Maebon, Zippo’s historian, said the Bradford location is the only connection.

“A lot of people assume that” they were related, she said, because New Method was in Bradford and because of its claim that “No wind can blow it out.”

“But it wasn’t us,” she said.

The New Method Manufacturing lighters were of the catalytic variety, which means they used a platinum ball to produce heat that would ignite a fuel of alcohol vapors. That’s very different from the Zippo process that employs an abrasive wheel to create a spark on a flint that ignites lighter fuel vapor from a wick.

The catalytic lighters have long since gone out of style, but Zippo has kept on going, far past its 500 millionth lighter.

Linda provided a copy of an undated — but clearly old — ’Round the Square column that said New Method Manufacturing was owned by Wright Scroxton and had its shop on South Avenue.

Interestingly, Zippo also advertised its lighters in Fur-Fish-Game later in the 1930s, Linda said, because Zippos were heavily marketed to outdoorsmen.