Parts: vessel, bowl, hose

1The water vessel

The first vessel was a coconut shell, which gave the narghile its name.¹²

The Amsterdam Pipe Museum holds a Yemeni water pipe of coconut and brass from 1860-1920. So the coconut did not disappear with the first hookahs.³

In the Indian city of Bidar the vessel becomes an art object of zinc alloy with brass inlay. Such a vessel from the late 17th century in the Metropolitan Museum is only 17.5 cm tall.⁴⁵

The glass vessel gives the name shisha, from Persian šīša, glass. Lane describes it in Egypt in 1836.⁶⁷

2The bowl

The Science Museum in London holds an earthenware hookah bowl from the 19th century, from the Arabian Peninsula or the Middle East: funnel-shaped, with a shallow well and holes in the bottom, painted in blue.⁸

Mu'assel gave the bowl a new problem: molasses juice runs down the holes into the stem. A 2016 patent application cites the Tangiers Phunnel and the Sahara Smoke Vortex as examples of bowls designed to keep the juice up top.⁹

The heat management device from Kaloud's patent replaces the foil with a plate that rests on the bowl.¹⁰

More in the chapter: Heat: from glowing coal to electricity

3Hose and mouthpiece

From the start the hookah was a thing for company, so the hose and mouthpiece are shared. In venues each guest usually gets a disposable mouth tip, but the hose, bowl and other parts are reused.¹¹

That is why in 2020 the WHO warned that sharing mouthpieces and hoses could spread the coronavirus.¹⁴

4The electronic hookah

Patent US 9,095,174, "Electronic hookah", describes a hookah in which the tobacco is replaced by an electronic device that produces vapour, with several people able to smoke at once. The application was published in 2013.¹²