by Dr Steve McCabe

TOBACCO has been cultivated and used for its stimulant properties in South America for over 8000 years. It was given as a gift to early Spanish and Portuguese visitors in the 15th century and grown in Europe for the first time in the early 16th century.

But the true revolution in tobacco use occurred in 1880 with the invention of the cigarette rolling machine by James Bonsack. Prior to this invention happening cigarettes were largely rolled by hand at a rate of a few every minute. Bonsack’s machine transformed that into over 200 cigarettes a minute – 20,000 every ten hours.

At last the tobacco industry had the means to mass produce cigarettes and make them affordable to everyone. Before 1880 tobacco consumption was dominated by pipes, cigars and chewing tobacco. But Bonsack’s machine transformed that picture almost overnight and ever since then the cigarette has become the predominant form of tobacco consumption. It became a standard ration issue for service personnel in both the First and Second Wars. By the 1920s 70 billion cigarettes a year were consumed in the U.S.A. alone.

The U.S.A. tobacco industry currently manufactures about 400 billion cigarettes a year. And whilst cigarette use has fallen in many Western countries it continues to rise elsewhere. In China, for example, cigarettes use has gone from 7.5 billion in 1911 to 2.4 trillion in 2012. Worldwide over 7 trillion cigarettes are now manufactured each year.