The Tobacco Reference Guide by David Moyer

by David Moyer, MD.

Chapter 4 History of tobacco in chronological order

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History of tobacco in chronological order: 1800

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The Egyptians had began rolling tobacco in paper in the early 1830's, creating the first

cigarettes. Following the Crimean War in 1856, French and British soldiers took

these "tobacco cylinders" back to Europe from where they also were sent to the

United States.

Annals of Allergy, November 1994, p. 381

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Frederic Chopin's mistress, the baroness de Dudevant, in 1840 became the first

woman to smoke in public in Paris.

JAMA, January 23, 1994, p. 629

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"In France, the cigarette was taken up during the Revolution by the antiroyalist masses

as the tobacco product least like snuff, that elaborately boxed and ceremoniously

taken powder so beloved by the monarchists. There was nothing fancy about French

cigarettes, notorious there as elsewhere for being cheap and made from the leavings

of other tobacco products - and further adulterated, it was rumored, by spit, urine, and

dung. By the time the government began licensing their manufacture around 1840,

cigarettes had been sufficiently improved to have a bourgeois appeal as well. A new,

much whiter kind of wrapper, extracted from rice straw, was developed that did not

stick to the lips the way earlier cigarette paper had, and a tasteless vegetable paste

made the rolling quicker and easier. By mid-century, the prominent tobacco merchant

Baron Joseph Huppmann had opened a factory in St. Petersburg and brought the

cigarette in quantity to the Russian upper class and intelligentsia, always keen on

French style and objets. "The cigarette was little seen in England until after the

Crimean War (1854-56), when its soldiers had been heavily exposed to the short

smokes, which seemed ideally suited to wartime use, by their French and Turkish

allies and were even proffered them by captured Russian officers. The English

veterans of Crimea took their new yen for the cigarette home, where the product had

previously been degraded as suitable mainly for the poor and so weak-tasting as to

invite the suspicion that those smokers who preferred it were effeminate."

Ashes to Ashes, p. 13

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