The Ronson Standard from 1943 was, as they say: simple and rock solid, just a standard model without airs and graces. The good piece was once widely used - and it is so robust that copies from the early days still appear on the second-hand market. As a child of its time, it comes with a material-transparent surface of brushed brass and visible mechanics. The gasoline-powered stone lighter can be refilled with standard lighter fuel and flint.

It took a while for human ingenuity to make what flint and fire drills were to early hominids available to Homo sapiens in the form of a lighter. At the beginning of the 19th century, inventors created the first modern lighters; at the beginning of the 20th century, engineers developed the pocket lighter. Nevertheless, all lighters have in common to constructively combine all the stuff necessary to make fire: fuel (a flammable liquid plus a cotton wick or compressed gas), a spark generator (ferrocerium or piezoelectric crystal) and the spark-triggering mechanism (friction wheel or striking iron) number among the prerequisites.

One of the pioneers in this field, the American manufacturer Ronson applied for a patent on a pocket lighter as early as 1913. Soon after, the name Ronson stood for technically innovative and well-designed lighters. A worldwide expansion followed, and Ronson founded a subsidiary, among others, in Great Britain in 1930. (We had a UK model, the Varaflame, in our assortment years ago.) The current owner of the brand right recently restarted producing some of Ronson’s lighters in Asia.