Lead Pipe III – The Final Chapter:
The Malleable History and Etymology of “Lead Pipe” Cinches
The Malleable History and Etymology of “Lead Pipe” Cinches
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| Lead Pipe (or tubing) |
Introduction
The idiom, “lead pipe cinch,”
denotes a sure thing. But deciphering
the origin of the idiom has been anything but.
In two earlier posts (Horse
Racing and Suicide and A
Stone-Cold “Lead Pipe” Update), I surveyed early examples of the idiom in
print, early stories explaining the purported origin of the idiom, and some
educated guesses about how or why “lead pipe” was chosen as an intensifier for
a regular-old “cinch.” The word, “cinch,”
comes from Spanish. It came into English
through Western cowboys who learned from Mexican caballeros to secure saddles
to their horses using a “cincha” strap.
A “cincha” strap could be tightened by pulling one end of the strap
through two rings, securing it with a cinch-knot. There was no need to secure the strap with a
pin through a hole in the strap, as one might with a typical belt buckle.[i] The word, “cinch,” later came to be used,
idiomatically, to mean having a strong hold on something, and eventually came
to refer to a sure thing.
A “lead pipe cinch” is attested
from as early as July 29, 1888.[ii] It first emerged in horse racing circles,
where a sure bet was a called a “lead pipe cinch.” A “lead pipe cinch” was thought to be even
stronger than an “air tight cinch.” The
imagery of an air-tight cinch is easy to understand. Since “cinch” means to tighten the strap
holding a saddle on a horse, an “air-tight cinch,” suggests cinching tight
enough to make it air-tight.
Purported Origin Stories
A “lead pipe” cinch, however, is more
cryptic. Two early explanations of the
idiom’s origin asserted that the expression was inspired by a drowning incident. The earlier of the two stories, from October
1888, just a few months after the earliest known appearance of the idiom, tells
of a burglar who fell into the water when jumping onto a ferry to cross from
New Jersey into New York City. As he
flounders, his partner takes bets on how quickly his buddy will drown. It’s a sure thing that he will drown quickly;
he knows that his friend has a section of lead pipe “coiled around his waist.” The bet was a “lead pipe cinch.”[iii] In the later story, from 1890, plumber fell
from the East River ferry. He drowned
because he was carrying one of the tools of his trade; he had “a coil of lead
pipe wrapped around his body,” like a belt or a “cinch.” The “lead pipe cinch” was too much for him,
and he drowned.[iv]
Although both of these explanations
sound far-fetched, they both echo details of an actual, widely reported, suicide
from several years earlier. In 1883, a
feather merchant named Robert Cunningham purchased several, high-value insurance
policies; and then jumped from the East River ferry. Witnesses commented on how quickly he disappeared
beneath the waves. When they found his
body several days later, they discovered why he sank so quickly. He had a ten pound bar of lead secured to his
vest by a length of wire. A coroner’s
inquest failed to rule the drowning a suicide, and the insurance policies
apparently paid off.[v]
Since the drowning happened
several years before the idiom is first recorded, it is possible that the suicide
could have inspired the idiom. Perhaps
gamblers admired the risk and payoff.
Perhaps he owed them money. But
the lapse of four years between the drowning and the earliest-known appearance
of the idiom in print may suggest that the idiom was coined, independently,
several years later. The actual drowning
incident may only have inspired the fanciful origin stories, when the new idiom
called to mind the earlier, notorious suicide.
[See also, my Final-Final Chapter - Lead Pipe IV; A Lead Pipe Could Be a Sure Thing Even Before it was a "Cinch"]
Why Lead Pipe?
If the idiom developed
independently, unrelated to the drowning, it is not immediately clear how or
why a “lead pipe” came to represent a particularly strong “cinch.” I imagine a “lead pipe” as something that is
stiff and rigid, like the stainless steel drain pipes under my kitchen sink; something
the lead pipe that Colonel Mustard or Mrs. Plum might have used to bonk Mr.
Boddy, on the head, in the billiards room, in the board game Clue (or Cluedo). The image of using a pipe as a cinch does not
ring true.
Lead also seems to be an unlikely
candidate to denote strength. As metals
go, lead is soft, malleable, and easily deformed. It seems that iron, steel, or any other
strong metal or material, would have been more logical choices. Although lead is presumably stronger than a
rope or other strap that might be used as a cinch on a horse, what is it about
a lead pipe that would make susceptible to being used as an intensifier for “cinch.”
Ironically, perhaps, it may be lead’s
weakness that holds the clue to why it was used to denote a strong cinch. In the
late-1800s, lead pipes were sold in coils, much like a coil of rope. Lead pipes were also freely, and easily,
bendable, and could be bent into knots.
It was not beyond reason to imagine using a lead pipe as a strong cinch. The public perception of the easy malleability
of lead pipe is illustrated by a story of a lead-pipe attack gone wrong:
Securing a section of lead
pipe, he hid in a doorway, and when a strapping big fellow happened to come
along he hit him a terrific blow on the back of his bull neck. The lead pipe wrapped around the big man’s
throat like a scarf, and he walked off with it whistling ‘Annie Laurie.’
Evening Star (Washington DC)September 22, 1899, page 13.
The form of the idiom is also
consistent with the form, “[BLANK] cinch,” where the [BLANK] is replaced by any
of a number of other materials that could be used to make a cinch, literally or
figuratively. The strength of a “lead
pipe cinch” lies in the fact that lead is stronger than an actual “rope cinch,”
or “leather cinch.” A “barbed wire cinch” is another type of strong cinch, and
the lowly “string cinch” is just the opposite, a sure loser.
Coils of Lead Pipe
In the late-1800s, lead pipe was
not anything like the rigid, stiff, stainless steel pipes under my kitchen
sink. They seem to have been more like
the copper tubing in my water supply; the kind of tubing that even I could bend
into a pretzel. Lead pipes were
manufactured and sold in coils, not unlike coils of rope. The practice is spelled out in a patent
issued in 1882, for an improvement in the method of manufacturing lead pipes:
In the manufacture of lead pipe
it is customary to wind it on a cylindrical drum or reel into bundles or coils
in order to put it into convenient for for subsequent handling . . . .
US Patent No. 269651, dated
December 26, 1882, to John Farrell, of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.
Such “coils” were available for
sale in various lengths:
The length of a coil or bundle
of lead pipe for ¼ in., 3/8 in., ½ in., and 1 in. pipes is 60 ft. Sometimes 1 ¼ in. pipe runs 60 ft., but this
is too heavy a bundle. The coil or
bundle of 1 ¼ in., 1 ½ in., 1 ¾ in., and 2 in. pipes is 36 feet long.
Philip John Davies, Standard Practical Plumbing: Being a
Complete Encyclopaedia for Practical Plumbers and Guide for Architects,
Builders, Gas Fitters, Hot Water Fitters, Ironmongers, Lead Burners, Sanitary
Engineers, Zinc Workers, London, E. & F.N. Spon, Ltd., 1889, Volume 1,
2d Ed. Revised, page 36.
The ease with which it could be
bent was one of the advantages of using lead pipe:
It has this great advantage
over cast-iron pipe fitting, that lead pipe, by the skilled plumber, can be
bent on the spot exactly as it is
wanted.
S. Stevens Hellyer, Lectures on the Science and Art of Sanitary
Plumbing, London, B. T. Batsford, 1882, page 63.
Although a certain amount of
skill and technique were required to bend larger pipes, smaller “pipes” were
easily bent:
Small
Pipe Bending.
For small pipes, such as from ½
in. to 1 in. “stout pipe,” you may
pull them round without trouble or danger; but for larger sizes, say, from 1 ¼
in. to 2 in., some little care is necessary, even in stout pipes.
Davies, Standard Practical Plumbing, London, E. & F. N. Spon, Ltd., 2d Edition, Revised, 1889, page 96.
Plumbing handbooks from the time
include lengthy chapters on techniques for bending pipes. Plumbing diagrams generally showed how the
pipes should be bent in place. They did
not suggest, and the catalogues did not generally supply, pre-bent sections of
pipe. “Lead pipes,” even pipes up to two
inches, could be bent into crazy shapes:
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| Davies, Standard Practical Plumbing, 2d Edition, page100. |
Lead pipes had common household
uses; being commonly used in water supply and drainage, and gas supply. Although the dangers of lead poisoning were
known in the 1880s, water supply pipes were often lined with copper, or copper
alloy, increase the strength of the pipe, and reduce the risk of lead poisoning. But lead pipes were still used in household
drainage systems; they had not yet learned to address the long-term, harmful
effects of lead leaching into the environment.
Lead pipes also had industrial
uses. They were often used as heating
coils, or condenser coils, in chemical processes. They were frequently used in distilling
processes for various chemicals, including moonshine.
 |
| Weekly Journal-Miner (Prescott, Arizona), June 19, 1918, Page 5. |
Lead pipe is still used for various industrial applications; and is still manufactured and sold in coils, and bent to to the desired shape.
Lead pipe coils appear to have
been well-known, common, and widely available in the late-1800s. They were so well-known that both of the
early, purported origin stories referred to “coils of lead pipe,” instead of
the lead bar and wire that were reported in the original suicide on which those
stories were based.
Lead pipe coils were also common
enough to be fodder for stupid jokes:
When a coil of lead pipe in
front of a hardware store begins to wiggle and stick out its forked tongue a
Dakota man knows it is time to swear off.
Saving the country by putting
the Bryan men in power would be like throwing a drowning man a coil of lead
pipe for a life preserver.
Potosi Journal (Potosi, Missouri), August 1, 1900, page 1.
A section from a coil of lead
pipe was featured prominently in a story about a man who was cheated by the
butcher. The butcher had apparently hidden
a small coil of lead pipe inside a turkey, to increase the sale price of a
turkey priced for sale by the pound. A
sketch that accompanied the article shows a curved, nearly round, coil of
small-diameter “lead pipe” that looks more like a Polska
kielbasa than what I normally think of as a section
of pipe.
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| Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, South Carolina), February 18, 1886, page 7. |
Coils of lead pipe were so common
that an autopsy on one of Barnum’s elephants (Jumbo’s widow, Alice), revealed a
“small coil of lead pipe” in her stomach.[vii] She also had three or four-hundred pennies,
part of a jack-knife, and a miscellaneous collection of pebbles in her
stomach. She did not die from eating too
much junk; she died in a tragic fire that also took the life of several other
elephants, including the famous “white elephant,” Toung Toulong.[viii]
[Blank] Cinch
The syntax of the idiom, “lead
pipe cinch,” is consistent with the syntax of other literal, as well as
idiomatic, uses of the word cinch; “[BLANK] cinch,” where [BLANK] represents
some material from which the actual, or proverbial, cinch is made. There were actual, “rope cinches” and
“leather cinches,” and figurative, “barbed wire cinches.” I found one reference to a figurative,
“string cinch,” which was the opposite of a “lead pipe cinch” – it was a sure
loser, or easy mark. Metaphoric cinches
could also be intensified, or strengthened, by cladding, binding, fastening, or
riveting the cinch with copper. The
expression, “steel cinch,” also appeared in print on several occasions; often
in reference to J. P. Morgan’s monopoly on steel.
Rope Cinches
When a rope was used to tie, or
secure, something, it could be called a “rope cinch”:
Live local from the Home Index:
Over 70,000,000 pairs of suspenders were made in the United States last year,
yet half the men around here wear a hay-rope cinch to keep the slack[ix]
of their trousers out of the mud.
The Morning Call (San
Francisco, California), May 20, 1890, page 1.
An effort was then made to
start Peeples [(at shortstop)], but he wouldn’t budge. Several suggestions were offered, such as
feeding him dirt, putting a rope cinch on his nose and twisting it, pouring
water in his ear and building a fire under him.
None of these remedies, however, were deemed expedient, so a young man
named Armstrong, lately signed, was put to work at short, while the other man
sat on the bench and sniffled.
The Morning Call (San Francisco, California), June 19, 1891, page
2.
He kept the
company of matadors busy every moment of the time for more than a quarter of an
hour. Then he was lassoed head and foot,
thrown and a rope cinch tied about him.
A Mexican mounted and rode the animal, the toreadors keeping up the
former exercises.
The San Francisco Call (San Francisco, California), September 17,
1895, page 4.
A race with wild steers for
mounts is on the program of the Elks’ rodeo at Klamath Falls. A rope cinch will be used instead of a
saddle, and contestants will be allowed a rope-and-tail hold.
Daily Capital Journal (Salem, Oregon), July 4, 1913, page 2.
Leather Cinches
When a band of leather is used to
bind, or secure something, it could be called a “leather cinch.” There are dozens of references to “leather
cinches.” Although most of those
references refer to straps used to secure a horse to a saddle, a wagon, or to
cargo on the back of the horse, “leather cinches,” could also be used as hat
bands and women’s girdles or belts:
I saw one man at church who
wore a massive Mexican hat with two or three pounds of silver braid on it, and
a leather cinch with two silver buckles for a band.
The Salt Lake Herald, April 19, 1891, page 13.
The Evening World (New York), July 25, 1892, page 2.
Barbed Wire Cinches
The less widely used idiom,
“barbed wire cinch,” enjoyed a brief lifespan.
When Guglielmo Marconi (the
inventor of the “wireless” telegraph) lost his fiancé, a clever writer joked:
What does it profit a young
inventor to devise a wireless telegraph and lose his girl? The next time Marconi gets a fiancée he had
better put a barbed wire cinch on her.
You can’t hold the modern maiden by the wireless process.
The San Francisco Call, January 29, 1902, page 6.
When a Kentucky politician advocated
a two-cent whiskey tax, a reporter speculated:
And it’s a barbed wire cinch
that he meant every word of it.
Daily Public Ledger (Maysville, Kentucky), March 27, 1906, page 2.
A candidate for office in
Tombstone, Arizona promised:
Now, I won’t ask the cowboys
and ranchers to come more than fourteen miles just to vote for me, as, of
coarse, I have a barb wire cinch anyhow.
Tombstone Epitaph, September 20, 1908, page 4.
String Cinch
Rope cinches and leather cinches
were functional. Metaphoric “barbed
wire” and “lead pipe” cinches were secure.
But the lowly “string cinch” was something less desirable – a sure
loser. The expression appeared in an
account of a baseball game involving actors and newspapermen:
Giffen pitched a wonderful
game, sending one man to base on balls and striking out a man in the sixth
inning. Smiley was always so busy
adjusting his face and his whiskers and his sweater that he never hit the ball
and the opposing batter regarded him as a string cinch.
St. Paul Daily Globe (Minnesota), June 26, 1895, page 4.
Since I could only find one
example of the expression, “string cinch,” I would not call it an idiom. But the expression did follow the familiar,
“[BLANK] cinch” format, in which [BLANK] is the name of the material used to
make the cinch. It is therefore further
evidence that the idiom, “lead pipe cinch,” may have been an allusion to using
a length of bendable, lead pipe coil, as a cinch.
Copper Bound/Lined/Fastened/Riveted
Cinches
Lining a lead pipe with copper
increases the strength of the pipe, while maintaining many of its beneficial
characteristics:
A metaphorical cinch could also
be strengthened by binding, lining, fastening, riveting, or otherwise strengthening
the cinch, with copper:
Lentilhon has a copper-bound
cinch bet on Sherrill.
The Sun (New York), May 9, 1889, page 6.
“I’ve had a good many hard turns in this
line,” he said. “Dead sure things gone
wrong! Copper fastened cinches left at
the post! And all that sort of demoralizing business, but an experience I had
in Chicago a few years ago beat all else hollow in a long and, by no means,
uninteresting career of playing horses.”
Lawrence Democrat (Lawrenceburt, Tennessee), October 2, 1891, page
1:
In race course language, the
owners look on it as a copper-lined lead-pipe cinch.”
The Sun (New York), November 22, 1891: page 3,
“The track will be heavy
tomorrow, and I’ve got a copper riveted, lead pipe, copyrighted, air tight
cinch. Firenze in the mud – she swims in
it – She can make th pace so hot that the track will be dry before she does the
first quarter.”
Los Angeles Herald, November 12, 1891, page 10.
Steel Cinches
 |
| J. P. Morgan |
 |
| Rich Uncle Pennybags |
In 1901, when J. Pierpont Morgan
(the model for the Monopoly mascot, Uncle Pennybags, and grand-father of Real Housewife of New York, Sonja Morgan's, ex-husband) cornered the world steel
market, the phrase “steel cinch” came into limited use for a brief period of
time. A cartoon that appeared in
Harper’s Weekly show Morgan securing a steel cinch around the world:
 |
| The American Monthly Review of Reviews, Vol. 23, No. 135, April 1901, page 416. |
The phrase was used again in 1905
when the Sultan of the
Ottoman Empire awarded Morgan the “grand cordon of the Osmanli order.” In this context, the phrase worked on several
levels; as a reference to Morgan’s control of the steel industry, and by an
oblique reference to rope, which could be used to tie a cinch (“cordon” is the French word for rope):
The important news comes from
Constantinople that the sultan has conferred on J. Pierpont Morgan “the grand
cordon of the Osmanli order.” Although
there is doubt in the minds of Mr. Morgan’s countrymen as to what sort of thing
that grand cordon is, the sultan’s compliment to our eminent fellow-citizen is
appreciated at its full value. It will
match nicely with the distinction conferred on Mr. Morgan by the American
public – “Grand Commander of the Steel Cinch.”
Los Angeles Herald, May 8, 1905, page 6.
The expression received a more
down-home treatment a few years later:
“Gents,”
he says, “you’ve hearn what the ‘greement is.
An’ now I wanter say let every gent put up every cent he’s got ‘cause
this is a cinch. You know me an’ you
know that when I says I’ve got a cinch I’ve got a real one – a double riveted,
reinforced Bessemer steel cinch.”
The San Francisco Call,
September 27, 1908, page 12.
Diamond and Double-Diamond
Cinches
At about the same time that the idiom,
“lead pipe cinch,” came into use on the East Coast, an alternate expression
could be heard in the American West, where the idioms, “diamond cinch” and “double-diamond
cinch,” was used metaphorically, to describe a having firm grasp on
something. But despite the well-known
strength of diamonds, the “diamond” in a “diamond cinch” does not relate to the
gemstones, it the diamond-shape described by a portion of a rope used to secure
a load on the back of a pack animal. The
“diamond” hitch and “double-diamond” hitch
procedures are still in use today.
The “double-diamond hitch” was in
use at least as early as 1872:
With one accord we dismounted,
adjusted our cinches, made everything secure about our saddles, put the
double-diamond hitch to the pack (a feat which none but Prof. Raymond could
perform), after which that pack and that horse were one and the same thing;
then we took again our places in the saddle.
The New North-West (Deer Lodge, Montana), June 1, 1872, page 2.
In 1878, “diamond cinch” was used
figuratively, in the sense of putting a stop to something by cinching it, as
opposed to the later sense of being a sure-thing:
Right here we draw the “diamond
cinch” on all this nonsense. – Helena (Mon.) Herald.
The Stark County Democrat (Canton, Ohio), March 28, 1878, page 2.
In 1889, an article about slang
included a section explaining the word cinch, and related idioms:
Everybody has heard “cinch”
used as the equivalent of a sure thing.
In loading burros or other pack animals of the far West, the packer
fastens the burden with ropes, which he ties around the animal’s body with a
peculiar knot. It never works loose, no
matter how rough the road. In Western
towns to-day a “diamond” or “double-diamond cinch” expresses a sure thing that
cannot possibly fail. New Yorkers draw
the knot somewhat closer, and when they grow emphatic speak of an “air-tight
cinch,” frequently abbreviated to “air-tight.”
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Washington), February 26, 1889,
page 7.
The phrase was still in idiomatic
use in 1894:
For some time past negotiations
have been pending and concerted effort made on the part of the Denver and Omaha
smelters to gather under their protecting wing the Salt Lake valley smelters,
and thus have what is termed in western parlance a “diamond cinch” upon the
mine owners and ore purchasers of this section.
Omaha Daily Bee (Nebrask), March 30, 1894, page 1.
Conclusion
In 1888, when the idiom, “lead
pipe cinch,” first appeared, lead pipes were sold in coils (like rope), and
were freely bendable (like a rope). It
would not have been much of a stretch to imagine wrapping a coil of “lead pipe”
around a horse to make a particularly strong cinch. The format of the idiom (“[BLANK] cinch”) is
consistent with format of expressions used to describe actual cinches, like “rope
cinches” and “leather cinches.” The form
of the idiom is also consistent with the form of other, less well-known
expressions (“barbed wire cinch” and “string cinch”), in which the material
being figuratively used for a cinch is more obviously rope-like.
It is therefore plausible, if not
likely, that the expression “lead pipe cinch” originated as an allusion to bending
a “lead pipe,” or lead tubing, into a particularly strong cinch. Although lead is not a particularly strong
metal, a lead pipe is certainly stronger than rope, leather and string.
I wouldn’t say it’s a “steel
cinch,” although it is at least a “barbed wire cinch.” It’s certainly more likely than a “string
cinch.”
It’s a “lead pipe cinch.”
[i] American Notes and Queries, volume 5,
number 17, August 23, 1890, page 197.
[ii] ADS-L
(American Dialect Society, Internet discussion group), July 10, 2010 (message
by Garson O’Toole, reporting find by Stephen Goranson). “They considered Lucky Baldwin’s great filly
Los Angeles a “lead pipe cinch,” and put their money on at any odds.” Boston
Sunday Globe, page 6, column 2.
[iii] The
New York Tribune, Octobe 8, 1888, page 12 (see my earlier post, A
Stone-Cold, Lead-Pipe Update).
[iv] Pittsburg Dispatch, April 27, 1890, page
20, column 8 (citing The St. Louis
Republic) (see my earlier post, Horseracing
and Suicide).
[v]
See my earlier post, Horseracing
and Suicide – the Heavy History and Etymology of “Lead-Pipe Cinch”.
[vi]
The allusion to seeing snakes, when drunk, is a precursor to the stereotypical,
drunken hallucination, the “Pink Elephant.” See my earlier post, The
Colorful History and Etymology of “Pink Elephants.”
[vii] The Doctor, Volume 1, Number 23,
November 16, 1887, page 5.
[viii]
See my earlier post, Buddhism
and Baseball – White Elephants and the White Elephant Wars.
[ix]
Note how the reference to the, “slack of their trousers,” hints at the origins
of the word, “slacks,” for pants.
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