History of Cigarette smoking

• Tobacco has been growing wild in the Americas for nearly 8000 years.
• Around 2, 000 years ago tobacco began to be chewed and smoked during cultural or religious ceremonies and events.

Who discovered tobacco and where?

• The first European to discover smoking was Christopher Columbus
• In 1531 tobacco was cultivated for the first time in Europe (at Santo Domingo). By 1600 tobacco use had spread across Europe and England and was being used as a monetary standard, a practice that continued throughout the following century
• By the 1700s smoking had become more widespread and a tobacco industry had developed industry

When was tobacco first considered to be dangerous to health?

• In 1602 an anonymous English author published an essay titled Worke of Chimney Sweepers (sic) which stated that illnesses often seen in chimney sweepers were caused by soot and that tobacco may have similar effects. This was one of the earliest known instances of smoking being linked to ill health.
• In 1795 Sammuel Thomas von Soemmering of Maine (Germany) reported that he was becoming more aware of cancers of the lip in pipe smokers
• In 1798 the US physician Benjamin Rush wrote on the medical dangers of tobacco
• During the 1920s the first medical reports linking smoking to lung cancer began to appear. Many newspaper editors refused to report these findings as they did not want to offend tobacco companies who advertised heavily in the media
• A series of major medical reports in the 1950s and 1960s confirmed that tobacco caused a range of serious diseases.

When were cigarettes developed?

• Cigarette making machines were developed in the latter half of the 1800s. The first such machines produced about 200 cigarettes per minute (today’s machines produce about 9, 000 per minute). Cheap mass production and the use of cigarette advertising allowed tobacco companies to expand their markets during this period.