Actually, the cigarette story may be one of the biggest surprises of the last hundred years. Sparking the incredible demand of this so-called cigarette century were two 19th-century wars. A newborn industry, advertising, fanned the embers. And a surprising new tobacco​—bright yellow, milder, and chemically different—​emboldened smokers to inhale its smoke. That noteworthy change in smoking habits, oral inhaling, ensured that most smokers would remain hooked the rest of their lives.

The Wars That Kindled a Demand

Tobacco remained an extravagant luxury until 1856, when cigarettes found their first mass market. That is when British and French soldiers returned from the Crimean War with “paper cigars” and a habit they had learned there. A cigarette fad swept across Europe, creating an unexpected demand for Turkish cigarettes or their English imitations.

The “Crimea fad” established the cigarette as a cheap wartime substitute for pipe or cigar. But the fad died. Furthermore, as Robert Sobel points out, “in the early 1860s, there appeared to be no way that middle-class American men​—the prime market for smokes—​would take to cigarettes.” Smoke from these early cigarettes was not as seductive as that of the modern cigarette. Like cigar smoke, it was slightly alkaline, and smokers held it in their mouths. There was no comfortable way to inhale as cigarette smokers usually do today. It was time for the next surprise development.

The American Civil War (1861-65) introduced a more addictive smoke, doing so with what tobacco expert Jerome E. Brooks calls “explosive force.” Once more, war brought the inexpensive cigarette to soldiers​—first Confederate, then Union. But this time it was no passing fad.

These cigarettes used American tobacco, and something about them was different. American growers had adopted new strains of tobacco that grew well in their nitrogen-poor soil. They also discovered, by a freak accident on a North Carolina farm, a curing process that turned their leaf bright yellow, mild, and sweet. In 1860 the U.S. Census Bureau called it “one of the most abnormal developments in agriculture that the world has ever known.” After a few cigarettes of this novel tobacco, new smokers felt a compelling urge to light up again.

Hooked!

Not understood at the time, this small but relentlessly growing market had become physically dependent, hooked, on a highly addictive substance. “The casual smoking of more than two or three cigarettes during adolescence” almost invariably leads to “regular dependent smoking,” says addiction researcher Dr. Michael A. H. Russell. “Unlike the adolescent who shoots heroin once or twice a week at first, an adolescent smoker experiences some two hundred successive nicotine ‘fixes’ by the time he has finished his first pack of cigarettes.”

Yes, inhaling was the secret. Nicotine, it seems, will penetrate and irritate mucous membranes only under alkaline conditions. Because cigarette smoke is slightly acid, it is the only tobacco smoke mild enough in mouth and throat for routine inhaling. But in the lungs the acid neutralizes, and nicotine dumps freely into the bloodstream. In just seven seconds the nicotine-rich blood arrives at the brain, so that each puff yields an almost instant nicotine reward. Youths who smoke more than one cigarette, reports a British government study, stand only a 15-percent chance to remain nonsmokers.

Thus, in the same decade as the Crimean War, the cigarette industry had spawned a powerful new habit. Within 20 years tobacco merchants hit on the idea of using catchy newspaper ads and testimonials to attract new customers. A machine patented in 1880 mass-produced the cigarette and kept the price low, while pictures of sports heroes and smiling ladies sold the cigarette image to the male public. But what kept them coming back for more? Nicotine dependency! As health writer William Bennet, M.D., puts it: “Mechanization, clever advertising and marketing techniques made their contribution, but [without nicotine] they never would have sold much dried cabbage.”

By 1900 the modern cigarette, already international, was ready to tighten its grip on world society.

For three centuries tobacco was medicine to Europeans. Doctors prescribed the herb for ailments from halitosis to corns. It all started in 1492 when Columbus and his crew, the first Europeans to see tobacco, found West Indies islanders smoking crude cigars in tribal ceremonies.

Long before Columbus, nearly all the early peoples of the Americas held tobacco sacred. Originally, smoking was a right and function of witch doctors and priests. They used its narcotic effect to induce visions during solemn tribal rites. “Tobacco was intimately associated with their gods,” reports historian W. F. Axton, “not only in their religious observances but also in their curative or healing procedures, all of which were connected in one way or another with their religion.” But if tobacco’s medicinal use is what first caught the eye of Spanish and Portuguese explorers, its use for pleasure soon followed.

“I’ll have another cigarette/​And curse Sir Walter Raleigh,” sang Beatles John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Sir Walter, called the “best-known propagandist among Englishmen for the recreative pipe,” grew tobacco on his estate in Ireland. He did his best to popularize the habit among fashionable society. Ahead of his time, he brings to mind the tobacco industrialist and advertising man of the ‘cigarette century.’

But it was the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, not Sir Walter’s charm, that made the 17th century the “Great Age of the Pipe,” says Jerome E. Brooks. “Chiefly through the agency of war,” he maintains, “smoking spread across the Continent” and into Asia and Africa. A similar development was to kick off the era of the cigarette.