The Eighteenth Century--Snuff holds sway

ENGLAND: George III's wife known as "Snuffy Charlotte"

FRANCE: Napoleon said to have used 7 lb. of snuff per month

1700: REGULATION: RUSSIA: Peter the Great smokes and repeals bans on smoking.(TSW)

1701: HEALTH: MEDICINE: Nicholas Andryde Boisregard warns that young people taking too much tobacco have trembling, unsteady hands, staggering feet and suffer a withering of "their noble parts."

I701-40: PRUSSIA: Tobacco councils of Frederick I and Frederick William I. (AHS) 1705: VIRGINIA Assembly passes a law legalizing lifelong slavery. . . . all servants imported and brought into this country, by sea or land, who were not christians in their native country . . . shall be . . . slaves, and as such be here bought and sold notwithstanding a conversion to christianity afterwards."

1713: LEGISLATION: Inspection regulations passed to keep up standards of Virginia leaf exports (not effective until 1730). (ATS)

1724: REGULATION: Pope Benedict XIII learns to smoke and repeals papal bulls against clerical smoking.(TSW)

1727: ECONOMY: "Tobacco notes" Become Legal Tender in Virginia. Tobacco Notes attesting to quality and quantity of one's tobacco kept in public warehouses are authorized as legal tender in Virginia. Used as units of monetary exchange throughout 18th Century. The notes are more convenient than the acutal leaf, which had been in use as money for over a century.

1730: LEGISLATION: Virginia Inspection Acts come into effect, standardizing and regulating tobacco sales and exports to prevent the export of "trash tobacco"--shipments diluted with leaves and household sweepings, which were debasing the value of Virginia tobacco. Inspection warehouses were empowered to verify weight and kind and kind of tobacco.

1730: VIRGINIA: BUSINESS: First American tobacco factories begun in Virginia--small snuff mills

1747: LEGISLATION: Maryland passes its own Maryland Inspection Act to control quality of exports.

1750: RHODE ISLAND BUSINESS: Gilbert Stuart builds snuff mill in Rhode Island, ships his products in dried animal bladders

1755.10: Virginia's tobacco crop fails because of extended drought conditions.

1758: LEGISLATION: Virginia Assembly passes wildly unpopular "Two Penny Act," forbidding payment in percentage of tobacco crop to some public officials, such as the Anglican clergy. The crop was small at this period, making tobacco a seller's market. The law mandating a regular salary for these officials severely cut the clergy's real income.

1759: GEORGE WASHINGTON, having gained 17,000 acres of farmland and 286 slaves from his new wife, MARTHA DANDRIDGE CUSTIS (these added to his own 30 slaves), harvests his first tobacco crop. The British market is unimpressed with its quality, and by 1761, Washington is deeply in debt.

1753: SWEDEN: Swedish Botanist Carolus Linnaeus names the plant genus, nicotiana. and describes two species, nicotiana rustica. and nicotiana tabacum."

1760: BUSINESS: Pierre Lorillard establishes a "manufactory" in New York City for processing pipe tobacco, cigars, and snuff. P. Lorillard is the oldest tobacco company in the US.

1761: HEALTH: ENGLAND: John Hill performs perhaps first clinical study of tobacco effects, warns snuff users they are vulnerable to cancers of the nose.

1761: HEALTH: ENGLAND: Dr. Percival Pott notes incidence of cancer of the scrotum among chimneysweeps, theorizing a connection between cancer and exposure to soot.

1762: General Israel Putnam introduces cigar-smoking to the US. After a British campaign in Cuba, "Old Put" returns with three donkey-loads of Havana cigars; introduces the customers of his Connecticut brewery and tavern to cigar smoking (BD)

1763: Patrick Henry argues a tobacco case, the "Parson's Cause."

 

The clergy had been paid in tobacco until a late 1750s Virginia law which decreed they should be paid in currency at the fixed rate of 2 cent/lb. When tobacco began selling for 6 cents/lb, the clergy protested, and the law was vetoed by the Crown. The old Virginia law was still sometimes adhered to, however, and some clergy sued their parishes. Henry defended one such parish (Hanover County) in court. He berated England's interference in domestic matters, and convinced the jury to give the plaintiff/clergyman only one penny in damages. 1771-12-17: REGULATION: FRANCE: French official is condemned to be hanged for admitting foreign tobacco into the country.

1776: AMERICAN REVOLUTION Along "Tobacco Coast" (the Chesapeake), the Revolutionary War was variously known as "The Tobacco War." Growers had found themselves perpetually in debt to British merchants; by 1776, growers owed the mercantile houses millions of pounds. British tobacco taxes are a further grievance. Tobacco helps finance the Revolution by serving as collateral for loans from France.

1780-1781: VIRGINIA: "TOBACCO WAR" waged by Lord Cornwallis to destroy basis of America's credit abroad (ATS)

1781: Thomas Jefferson suggests tobacco cultivation in the "western country on the Mississippi." (ATS)

1788: BUSINESS: Spanish NEW ORLEANS opened for export of tobacco by Americans in Mississippi valley. (ATS)

1789-1799: FRENCH REVOLUTION French masses begin to take to the cigarito, as the form of tobacco use least like the aristocratic snuff. The hated tobacco monopoly is abolished (to be resurrected by Napoleon)

1791: HEALTH: ENGLAND: London physician John Hill reports cases in which use of snuff caused nasal cancers

1794: TAXES: The U.S Congress passes its first tax on tobacco. The tax of 8 cents applies only to snuff, not the more plebian chewing or smoking tobacco. The tax is 60% of snuff's usual selling price.

1795: HEALTH: Sammuel Thomas von Soemmering of Maine reports on cancers of the lip in pipe smokers

1798. HEALTH: Famed physician Benjamin Rush writes on the medical dangers of tobacco and claims that smoking or chewing tobacco leads to drunkenness.

1798. The United States Marine Hospital Service is established. The service will become the Public Health Service in 1912 and had been made part of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in 1953. 

 

The Nineteenth Century--The Age of the Cigar

1800: CANADA: Tobacco begins being commercially grown.

1805: LEWIS AND CLARK explore Northwest, using gifts of tobacco as "life insurance."

1810: CONNECTICUT: Cuban cigar-roller brought to Suffield to train local workers. (ATS)

1820: American traders open the Santa Fe trail, find ladies of that city smoking "seegaritos." (ATS)

1826: ENGLAND is importing 26 pounds of cigars a year. The cigar becomes so popular that within four years, England will be importing 250,000 pounds of cigars a year.

1826: MEDICINE: The purified form of the nicotine compound is obtained

1828: GERMANY: Heidelberg students Ludwig Reimann and Wilhelm Heinrich Posselt write exhaustive dissertations on the pharmacology of nicotine, concluding it is a "dangerous poison."

1830s: First organized anti-tobacco movement in US begins as adjunct to the temperance movement. Tobacco use is considered to dry out the mouth, "creating a morbid or diseased thirst" which only liquor could quench..

1830: PRUSSIA: Prussian Government enacts a law that cigars , in public, be smoked in a sort of wire-mesh contraption designed to prevent sparks setting fire to ladies' "crinolines" and hoop skirts. (BD)

1832: TURKEY: Invention of the paper-rolled cigarette? While Southwest Indians, Aztecs and Mayans had used hollow reeds, cane or maize to fashion cylindrical tobacco-holders, and Sevillians had rolled cigar-scraps in thrown-away paper (papeletes), an Egyptian artilleryman [in the Turk/Egyptian war] is credited with the invention of the cigarette as we know it. In the siege of Acre, the Egyptian's cannon crew had improved their rate of fire by rolling the gunpowder in paper tubes. For this, he and his crew were rewarded with a pound of tobacco. Their sole pipe was broken, however, so they took to rolling the pipe tobacco in the paper. The invention spread among both Egyptian and Turkish soldiers. And thus . . . (Good-Bye to All That, 1970)

1832: AGRICULTURE: TUCK patents curing method for Virginia leaf.

1839: AGRICULTURE: NORTH CAROLINA: SLADE "yallercure" presages flue-cured Bright tobacco. Charcoal used in flue-curing for the first time in North Carolina. Not only cheaper, its intense heat turns the thinner, low-nicotine Piedmont leaf a brilliant golden color. This results in the classic American "Bright leaf" variety, which is so mild it virtually invites a smoker to inhale it.(RK), (ATS)

1836: USA: Samuel Green of the New England Almanack and Farmers Friend writes that tobacco is an insectide, a poison, a fillthy habit, and can kill a man. (LB)

1842: Opium War. Treaty of Nanjing forces China to accept opium from British traders

1843: FRANCE: SEITA monopoly begins manufacture of cigarettes.

1843: MEDICINE: The correct molecular formula of nicotine is established

1845: JOHN QUINCY ADAMS writes to the Rev. Samuel H. Cox: "In my early youth I was addicted to the use of tobacco in two of its mysteries, smoking and chewing. I was warned by a medical friend of the pernicious operation of this habit upon the stomach and the nerves.''

1845: ART: Prosper Merimee's novel, Carmen, about a cigarette girl in an Andalusian factory, is published

1846-1848: MEXICAN WAR US soldiers bring back from the Southwest a taste for the darker, richer tobacco favored in Latin countries--cigarros and cigareillos--leading to an explosive increase in the use of the cigar. (The South remains firmly attached to chewing tobacco.)

1847: ENGLAND: Philip Morris opens shop; sells hand-rolled Turkish cigarettes.

1848: GERMANY: REGULATION: Abolition of the last restrictions in Berlin (AHS)

1848: ITALY: "Tobacco War" erupts as Italians protest AUSTRIAN control of the tobacco monopoly.

1849: BUSINESS: J.E. Liggett and Brother is established in St. Louis, Mo., by John Edmund Liggett

1852:Washington Duke, a young tobacco farmer, builds a modest, two-story home near Durham, NC, for himself and his new bride. The house, and the log structure which served as a "tobacco factory" after the Civil War may still be seen at the Duke Homestead Museum.

1852: Matches are introduced, making smoking more convenient.

1853-1856: EUROPE: CRIMEAN WAR British soldiers learn how cheap and convenient the cigarettes ("Papirossi") used by their Turkish allies are, and bring the practise back to England. The story goes that the English captured a Russian train loaded with provisions--including cigarette, and from there--

1854: ENGLAND: BUSINESS: London tobacconist Philip Morris begins making his own cigarettes. Old Bond Street soon becomes the center of the retail tobacco trade.

1854: FRIEDRICH TIEDEMANN writes the first exhaustive treatment on tobacco.

1856-1857: ENGLAND: A running debate among readers about the health effects of tobacco runs in the British medical journal, Lancet. The argument runs as much along moral as medical lines, with little substantiation.(RK)

1856-1857: ENGLAND: The country's first cigarette factory is opened by Crimean vet Robert Gloag, manufacturing "Sweet Threes" (GTAT)

1857: BUSINESS: James Buchanan "Buck" Duke is born to Washington "Wash" Duke, an independent farmer who hated the plantation class, opposed slavery, and raised food and a little tobacco.

1859: Reverend George Trask publishes tract "Thoughts and stories for American Lads: Uncle Toby's anti-tobacco advice to his nephew Billy Bruce". He writes, "Physicians tell us that twenty thousand or more in our own land are killed by [tobacco] every year (LB)

1860: The Census for Virginia and North Carolina list 348 tobacco factories, virtually all producing chewing tobacco. Only 6 list smoking tobacco as a side-product (which is manufactured from scraps left over from plug production).

1860: BUSINESS: Manufactured cigarettes appear. A popular early brand is Bull Durham.

1860: BUSINESS: MARKETING: Lorillard wraps $100 bills at random in packages of cigarette tobacco named "Century," in order to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the firm (BD)

1861-1865: USA: THE CIVIL WAR: Tobacco is given with rations by both North and South; many Northerners are introduced to tobacco this way. During Sherman's march, Union soldiers now attracted to the mild, sweet "bright" tobacco of the South, raided warehouses--including Washington Duke's--for some chew on the way home. Some bright made it all the way back. Bright tobacco becomes the rage in the North.

1862: First federal USA tax on tobacco; instituted to help pay for the Civil War, yields about three million dollars.(TSW)

1863: SUMATRA: Nienhuys creates Indonesian tobacco industry Dutch businessman Jacobus Nienhuys travels to Sumatra seeking to buy tobacco, but finds poor growing and production facilities; his efforts to rectify the situation are credited with establishing the indonesian tobacco industry.

1863: US Mandates Cigar Boxes. Congress passes a law calling for manufacturers to create cigar boxes on which IRS agents can paste Civil War excise tax stamps. The beginning of "cigar box art."

1864: CIVIL WAR: The first federal cigarette excise tax is imposed to help pay for the Civil War.

1864: AGRICULTURE: WHITE BURLEY first cultivated in Ohio Valley; highly absorbent, chlorophyll-deficient new leaf proves ideal for sweetened chewing tobacco.

1864: BUSINESS: 1st American cigarette factory opens and produces almost 20 million cigarettes.

1865-70: NEW YORK CITY: Demand for exotic Turkish cigarettes grows in New York City; skilled European rollers imported by New York tobacco shops. (ATS)

1868: UK: Parliament passes the Railway Bill of 1868, which mandates smoke-free cars to prevent injury to non-smokers.

1871: BUSINESS: R.A. Patterson founds the "Lucky Strike" company, named for the 1849 California Gold Rush.

1873: BUSINESS: Philip Morris dies. (Yes, that Philip Morris)

1873: Myers Brothers and Co. markets "Love" tobacco with them of North-South Civil War reconcilliation.

1874: BUSINESS: Washington Duke, with his sons Benjamin N. Duke and James Buchanan Duke, builds his first tobacco factory

1875: BUSINESS: Allen and Ginter offer a reward of $75,000 for cigarette rolling machine. (LB)

1875: BUSINESS: R. J. Reynolds founds R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company to produce chewing tobacco, soon producing brands like Brown's Mule, Golden Rain, Dixie's Delight, Yellow Rose, Purity.

1875: BUSINESS: Richmond, VA: Allen & Ginter cigarette brands ("Richmond Straight Cut No. 1," "Pet") begin using picture cards to stiffen the pack and give the buyer a premium. Some themes: "Fifty Scenes of Perilous Occupations," "Flags of All Nations," boxers, actresses, famous battles, etc. The cards are a huge hit.(RK)

1875: ART: Georges Bizet's opera, Carmen, based on Merimee's novel about a cigarette girl in an Andalusian factory, opens.

1876: CENNTENNIAL CELEBRATION: PHILADELPHIA: Allen & Ginter's cigarette displays are so impressive that some writers thought the Philadelphia exposition marked the birth of the cigarette as well as the telephone. (CC)

1876: Benson & Hedges receives its first royal warrant from Edward VII, Prince of Wales.

1878: BUSINESS: J.E. Liggett & Brother incorporates as Liggett & Myers Company. By 1885 Liggett is world's largest plug tobacco manufacturer; doesn't make cigarettes until the 1890's

1878: BUSINESS: Trading cards and coupons begin being widely used in cigarette packs. Edward Bok suggested to a manufacturer that the blank "cardboard stiffeners" in the "cigarette sandwich', might have biographies on one side and pictures on the other. The American News Company-distributed Marquis of Lorne cigarettes were the first to have the new picture cards in each pack (GTAT)

c.1880s: USA: Women's Christian Temperance Movement publishes a "Leaflet for Mothers' Meetings" titled "Narcotics", by Lida B. Ingalls. Discusses evils of tobacco, especially cigarettes. Cigarettes are "doing more to-day to undermine the constitution of our young men and boys than any other one evil" (p. 7). (LB)

c.1880s: ADVERTISING: Improvements in transportation, manufacturing volume, and packaging lead to the ability to sell the same branded product nationwide. What can be sold nationwide can and must be advertised nationwide. Advertising agencies sprout like wildflowers. The most advertised product throughout most of the 19th century: elixirs and patent medicines of the "cancer cure" variety.

c.1880s: ENGLAND: BUSINESS: Mssrs. Richard Benson and William Hedges open a tobacconist shop near Philip Morris in London.(RK)

1880s. JB Duke's aggressive saleman Edward Featherston Small hires a cigarette saleswoman, Mrs. Leonard.

 

In .St. Louis, when retailers ignored him, Small advertised for a saleswoman. A petite, thin-lipped widow, a Mrs. Leonard, applied for the job and was accepted. This little stunt gave the Dukes thousands of dollars of free publicity in the local newspapers.

(CC) 1880: Bonsack machine granted first cigarette machine patent

1881: BUSINESS James Buchanan ("Buck") Duke enters the manufacturered cigarette business, moving 125 Russian Jewish immigrants to Durham, NC. First cigarette: Duke of Durham brand

 

. Duke's factory produces 9.8 million cigarettes, 1.5 % of the total market. 1883: BUSINESS: Oscar Hammerstien receives patent on cigar rolling machine.(TSW)

1884: BUSINESS: Duke heads to New York City to take his tobacco business national and form a cartel that eventually becomes the American Tobacco Co. Duke buys 2 Bonsack machines., getting one of them to produce 120,000 cigarettes in 10 hours by the end of the year. In this year Duke produces 744 million cigarettes, more than the national total in 1883. Duke's airtight contracts with Bonsack allow him to undersell all competitors.

1886: USA Patent received for machine to manufacture plug tobacco. (LB)

1886: Tampa, FL: Don Vicente Martinez Ybor opens his first cigar factory. Others follow. Within a few years, Ybor city will become the cigar capital of the US.

1886: JB Duke targets women with "Cameo" brand.

1887: PALESTINE: A traveler reports that the Arabs of the Syrian Desert get giddy and headaches from a few whiffs of tobacco. They smoke a local plant 'Hyoscyamus'. (LB)

1887: USA: Advice from the cigar and tobacco price list of M. Breitweiser and Brothers of Buffalo, Item #5 -- "If you think smoking injurious to your health, stop smoking in the morning". (LB)

1887: USA: Two men held pipe smoking contest that lasted one and a half hours. Victory was declared when one man filled his pipe for the tenth time, his oppenent did not. (LB)

1887: His contracts with Bonsack unknown to his competitors, Buck Duke slashes prices, sparking a price war he knew he'd win.

1889: SCIENCE: Nicotine and nerve cells reported on. Langley and Dickinson publish landmark studies on the effects of nicotine on the ganglia; they hypothesize that there are receptors and transmitters that respond to stimulation by specific chemicals. (RK)

1889: USA: ADVERTISING: Buck Duke spends an unheard-of $800,000 in billboard and newspaper advertising.

1889-04-23: BUSINESS: The five leading cigarette firms, including W. Duke Sons & Company, unite. James Buchanan "Buck" Duke emerges as the president of the new American Tobacco Company.

c.1890s: USA: Women's Christian Temperance Movement publishes "Narcotics", by E. B. Ingalls. Pamphlet discusses evils of numerous drugs, tobacco, cocaine, ginger, hashish, and headache medicines. Offers 16 suggestions to workers. (LB)

c.1890s: INDONESIA: BUSINESS: "Kretek" cigarettes invented. The story is that Noto Semito of Kudus was desperate to cure his asthma. He rolled tobacco mixed with crushed cloves in dried corn leaves--and cured his respiratory ailments. He then Began manufacturing clove cigarettes under the name BAL TIGA (Three Balls). He became a millionaire, but competition was so fierce he eventurally died penniless in 1953.

1890: Peak of chewing tobacco consumption in V. S., three pounds per capita. (ATS)

1890: "Tobacco" appears in the US Pharmacopoeia, an official government listing of drugs.

1890s: SCIENCE: Pure nicotine is first synthesized.

1890: 26 states and territories have outlawed the sale of cigarettes to minors (age of a "minor" in a particulary state could be anything from 14-24.)

1890: BUSINESS: Dukes establish the American Tobacco Company, which will soon monopolize the entire US tobacco industry. ATC will be dissolved in Anti-Trust action in 1911.

1890: LITERATURE: My Lady Nicotine, Sir James Barrie, London

1892: REGULATION: Reformers petition Congress to prohibit the manufacture, importation and sale of cigarettes. The Senate Committee on Epidemic Diseases, while agreeing that cigarettes are a public health hazard, finds that only the states have the authority to act. The committee urges the petitioners to seek redress from state legislatures.

1892: BUSINESS: Book matches are invented, but are a technological failure. Since the striking surface was inside the book, all the matches caught fire often. By 1912, the technology would be perfected.

1893: REGULATION: The state of Washington bans the sale and use of cigarettes. The law is overturned on constitutional grounds as a restraint of free trade.

1894: BUSINESS: By now, Philip Morris has passed from the troubled Morris family, and is controlled by the Thompson family (RK).

1894: BUSINESS: Brown & Williamson formed as a partnership in Winston-Salem, making mostly plug, snuff and pipe tobacco. (RK).

1894: LITERATURE: Under Two Flags by Ouida (Louise de la Ramee). Cigarette, the waif heroine "Rides like an Arab, Smokes like a Zouave." Cigarette is describes as "Enfant de L'armee, Femme de la Fume, Soldat de la France."

1896: REGULATION: Smoking banned in the House; chewing still allowed

1898: SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR: Congress raises taxes on cigarettes 200%

1898: IN COURT: Tennessee Supreme Court upholds a total ban on cigarettes, ruling they are "not legitimate articles of commerce, because wholly noxious and deleterious to health. Their use is always harmful."

1899: Lucy Payne Gaston, who claims that young men who smoke develop a distinguishable "cigarette face," founds the Chicago Anti-Cigarette League, which grows by 1911 to the Anti-Cigarette League of America, and by 1919 to the Anti-Cigarette League of the World.

1899: The Senate Finance Committee, in secret session, rolls back the wartime excise tax on cigarettes.(RK)

1899: BUSINESS: Liggett & Myers taken into Duke's Tobacco Trust. Duke has finally won the Bull Durham brand of chew.

1899: BUSINESS: RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company incorporates..

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