To call smoking a problematic habit would be an enormous understatement. Cigarettes are perhaps the only legal consumer products in the world that are lethal almost 100 percent of the time when they’re used as intended. To compound that problem, cigarettes are also incredibly addictive. Many people also find tobacco very enjoyable to use, which only makes quitting harder.
In the 20th century, it became obvious to doctors and researchers that cigarette smoking is definitely a dangerous habit that’s almost certain to lead to early death – and as soon as that fact was widely known, the search for a safer alternative began in earnest. While there is surely no such thing as a truly safe cigarette, there have been many attempts to create smoking substitutes that allowed people to use nicotine or other stimulating substances without inhaling smoke.
Although decades went by before any of those products achieved any real measure of commercial success, we have finally reached a point today at which the smoke-free alternatives that are available are actually beginning to make a dent in smoking rates around the world. The journey hasn’t been easy, but it has definitely been fascinating. Here are some of the key products and concepts that have evolved in the world’s search for a “safe” cigarette.
1963: Herbert A. Gilbert’s Smokeless Cigarette
The first known attempt to create a safe cigarette happened in 1963 when tinkerer Herbert A. Gilbert invented a device that he called the “Smokeless Cigarette” or just the “Smokeless.” The Smokeless was a small battery-powered device that heated a flavored liquid, turning it into a vapor that the user could inhale – much like today’s electronic cigarettes. Gilbert even invented a wide array of flavors for his device including cinnamon, rum and mint. None of his flavors contained nicotine, but Gilbert was convinced that people would want to buy the Smokeless anyway. The device had potential, he thought, for helping people quit smoking and for helping dieters satisfy their food cravings without eating unhealthy snacks.
Gilbert patented the Smokeless, but he was unable to find a company that wanted to bring the product to the market. Gilbert did, however, live long enough to see his idea used as the basis for the modern e-cigarette more than four decades later.
1980s: Favor Cigarette
The next major attempt to create a safe cigarette actually resulted in the creation of a real product that made it to the market. The product was called the Favor cigarette, and it has the distinction of being completely non-electronic. In fact, the design of the Favor cigarette was surprisingly simple – it was nothing more than a plastic tube containing a paper plug impregnated with liquid nicotine. Inhaling through the tube caused the plug to release some of the nicotine, which would then be absorbed through the user’s lungs. Because the Favor cigarette produced no smoke and no visible vapor, it could be used anywhere.
In 2014, vaping website The Ashtray Blog interviewed Dr. Norman Jacobson, who had been the CEO of the company that produced Favor. In the interview, Jacobson asserted that his group actually invented the word “vaping” back in the 1980s – a term that we now use to signify the use of an e-cigarette. Although Favor did experience some commercial success, the brand was cited by the FDA for selling a “new drug” without approval. Favor didn’t challenge the FDA’s warning letter and instead sold their intellectual property to a pharmaceutical company in Sweden.
1996: Eclipse Cigarette
By the 1990s, researchers had determined fairly conclusively that tar – not nicotine – is the primary component of cigarette smoke that’s dangerous to the body. Around that time, the major tobacco companies worked in earnest on developing alternative products that would heat tobacco rather than burning it, thus eliminating or at least minimizing the inhalation of tar. It was difficult for the tobacco companies to figure out how they would market these products, though, because marketing heat-not-burn products as safer alternatives would be the same as admitting that their core products – traditional cigarettes – were dangerous. That could potentially have a detrimental effect on the lawsuits against the tobacco industry that were ongoing at the time. Nevertheless, R.J. Reynolds – the maker of Camel cigarettes – pressed forward with their heat-not-burn aspirations and released the Eclipse cigarette in 1996.
Eclipse looked like a traditional cigarette from the outside, but the user didn’t actually light it by setting tobacco on fire. Instead, the Eclipse cigarette had a carbon element that glowed red for several minutes and heated a plug of tobacco impregnated with propylene glycol. The heat from the element vaporized the propylene glycol, which carried the nicotine out of the tobacco for inhalation. Eclipse never sold well, and it was eventually removed from the market in the mid-2010s. Also, the cigarette’s design wasn’t foolproof. If the user didn’t follow the instructions exactly, the carbon element could become hot enough to burn the tobacco, essentially turning Eclipse into an unfiltered cigarette.
2000s: Electronic Cigarette
The modern electronic cigarette was developed by Chinese pharmacist Hon Lik in the early 2000s and patented in 2003. His device was the first product that vaporized a flavored, nicotine-infused liquid for inhalation, and it essentially combined all of the ideas that came before. Like the Eclipse cigarette, Lik’s invention used propylene glycol to carry the nicotine. Like the Favor cigarette, the electronic cigarette used isolated nicotine rather than tobacco – and like Herbert A. Gilbert’s Smokeless, the electronic cigarette was a battery-powered device that vaporized a flavored liquid.
Modern e-cigarettes like Lost Mary vapes have modernized Hon Lik’s original idea in many ways. Lik’s first electronic cigarette, for instance, used ultrasound to vaporize the nicotine liquid. Today’s devices use heating elements instead, promoting the production of bigger and more satisfying clouds. Lik’s invention used the freebase form of nicotine. Many modern e-cigarettes, however, use the salt form of nicotine because it’s less alkaline and doesn’t cause throat irritation at higher strengths. Using the salt form of nicotine allows modern e-cigarettes to deliver nicotine almost as efficiently as conventional cigarettes, and that has helped e-cigarettes to become the first products to seriously challenge the dominance of Big Tobacco around the world.