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To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. It's natural to think that cigarettes became enormously popular worldwide because they're so addictive — or because tobacco companies were so good at marketing and advertising.
Those things no doubt played a role. But there's another, often-forgotten factor that helped cigarettes conquer the world: technology. The introduction of cigarette-rolling machines in the 19th century was a truly world-changing invention that had an enormous impact on public health, a s Gary Cross and Robert Proctor explain in their book Packaged Pleasures.
Before , companies could only roll four to five cigarettes per minute. That just wasn't quick enough for cigarettes to become a dominant mass-market item. The introduction of the rolling machine in changed everything. Companies got faster and faster at rolling cigarettes.
By , they could roll a staggering 20, per minute:. Prior to , cigarettes were rolled by hand, which meant a rate of only a few cigarettes per minute. One of the first cigarette-rolling machines, the Susini, appeared in , but was finicky and wasn't widely adopted. Things changed significantly in , when James Bonsack invented a machine that could roll cigarettes a minute, or 20, cigarettes in 10 hours. The Bonsack machine worked by creating a single long cigarette that could be cut into appropriate portions.
The original patent drawing for the Bonsack machine. By the early 20th century, with the growth in cigarette smoking, articles addressing the health effects of smoking began to appear in scientific and medical journals. In , researchers in Cologne, Germany, made a statistical correlation between cancer and smoking.
Eight years later, Dr. Raymond Pearl of Johns Hopkins University reported that smokers do not live as long as non-smokers.
By , the American Cancer Society began to warn about possible ill effects of smoking, although it admitted that "no definite evidence exists" linking smoking and lung cancer. A statistical correlation between smoking and cancer had been demonstrated; but no causal relationship had been shown.
More importantly, the general public knew little of the growing body of statistics. That changed in , when Reader's Digest published "Cancer by the Carton," an article detailing the dangers of smoking. The effect of the article was enormous: Similar reports began appearing in other periodicals, and the smoking public began to take notice.
The following year, cigarette sales declined for the first time in over two decades. The tobacco industry responded swiftly.
By the major U. With counsel from TIRC, tobacco companies began mass-marketing filtered cigarettes and low-tar formulations that promised a "healthier" smoke. Liggett and Brother, an American company established in St. Louis in Even though chewing tobacco was the most popular form of tobacco in the 19 th century R. Reynolds Tobacco Company was founded in and produced chewing tobacco, exclusively cigarettes were slowly taking sway.
Cigarettes truly came into popularity after the invention of the cigarette-making machine by James Bonsack in The ATC survives today as a part of British American Tobacco, a global company with reported revenues of 13, billion in Cigarettes came to the height of their popularity during the First and the Second World War. Tobacco companies sent millions of packs of cigarettes to soldiers on the front lines, creating hundreds of thousands of faithful and addicted consumers in the process.
The number of female smokers in the United States tripled by Dangers associated with nicotine are nothing new. Ever since people started smoking, there were those far-sighted enough to suggest that the habit is dangerous and addictive.
In the late 15th century, Christopher Columbus was given tobacco as a gift from the Native Americans. It gained instant popularity in Europe, for they believed that tobacco had magical healing powers. In , Massachusetts passed a state law making smoking in public illegal. This was the earliest legislation recorded regarding smoking.
In Pierre Lorillard established the first company that processed tobacco to make cigars and snuff.
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