Inventor: H. Halvorson
Patent number: 213415
Filing date: Nov 1, 1878
Issue date: Mar 1879

This cool customer comes from 1878. H. Halvorson wasn’t about to get sunstroke, no sir! I love that Halvorson invented a sun helmet for keeping gentlemen in the shade on those sunny days but completely missed the rain umbrella market. Halvorson’s Sun Helmet never took off, however Sun Helmets or Pith helmets do have a pretty nasty history. Used by all European and colonial powers, and by the United States Army during the 1880s^, in the Southwest United States.

From Wikipedia: They were commonly worn by white officers commanding locally recruited soldiers in the colonial troops of France, Britain, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Imperial Germany and the Netherlands, as well as civilian officials in their tropical territories. White troops serving in the tropics usually wore pith helmets, although on active service they were sometimes replaced by more comfortable and less conspicuous alternatives such as the wide brimmed slouch hats worn by US troops in the Philippines and by British Empire forces in the later stages of the Boer War.

During the Anglo-Zulu War, British troops dyed their white pith helmets with tea, mud or other makeshift means of camouflage. Subsequently khaki-coloured pith helmets became standard issue for active tropical service.

Pith helmets were widely worn during World War I by British Empire, Turkish, Belgian, French and German colonial troops fighting in the Middle East and Africa.

Helmets of this style (but without true pith construction) were used as late as World War II by Japanese, European and American military personnel in hot climates. Included in this category are the sun helmets worn in North Africa by Italian troops, South African Army and Air Force units and Germany’s Afrika Korps, as well as similar helmets used to a more limited extent by U.S. and Japanese forces in the Pacific Theater.

The entire military of the America’s colony the Philippines, which consisted of an armygendarmerie, used sun helmets. The U.S. Marine Corps first issued pith helmets called “elephant hats” to the 1st Marine Division’s deployment to Guantánamo Bay in 1940. They were worn in the South Pacific as well as worn by recruits in United States Marine Corps Boot Camp. The Axis Second Philippine Republic’s military, known as the Bureau of Constabulary, as well as other guerrilla groups in the Philippines was another user of sun helmets. The British Army formally abolished the tropical helmet in 1948.

The Ethiopian Imperial Guard retained pith helmets as a distinctive part of their uniform until the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974. Imperial Guard units serving in the Korean War often wore these helmets when not in actual combat.