FIRST CENTURY

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 425, 9 January 1933, Page 2

FIRST CENTURY

CIGARETTE SMOKING STARTED ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO. FORTUNES FOR SMOKERS. A frivolous centenary v/hich has 'just been celebrated in England is 'that of ihe cigarette, first invented, so it is said — tho'ugh, in View of the simplicity of th© invention, it is hard to be believed — a hundred years ago, says a leading artiele in the "Evening Star." As the celebration, apart from newspaper articles, has been confined to the trade, with a ke.en eye for commercial benefits, no great honour perhaps has beeii done to the discovery, though it may be that it has had as much as was deserved by it. What Salvation Yeo smoked, when he "mazed" the servants of -Sir Richard Grenville's household, was a cigar, rolled by himself, and men were content to enjoy their tobacco in that form or from pipes for-seve.ral hundreds of years, till an Egyptian soldier in the campaign against the Turks in 1832, so the story goes, accidentally hit upon another method. 'Finding himself with a caravan load of pipes that had been smashed beyond repair, it oceured to him to stuff some of the weed into an Indiapaper cartridge case, and smoke it in that way. So was the first cigarette made; but it was not till 1857 that a Greek tobacco merchant opened in London a shop where. Russians, Greeks, and Spaniards, as well as Englishmen who had contracted the habit in the Crimea, could procure specially-cut tobacco and papers which could be manipulated into cigarettes. Four years later an e.x-cap-tain of the Russian Army, Mr. John Theodoridi, opened a shop on a much larger scale, at which they were sold ready-niade, no fewer than four table Workers being employed in the manufacture. Turlcish tobacco was used, and all the cigarettes Were fitted, as they are in Russia to-day, with cardboard mouthpieces. They were sold in fancy boxes, containing portraits of beauties on cards, also lookingglasses, at the price of twelve cigarettes for a shilling. Competition was prbvoked, and soon much cheaper — and some very bad — cigarettes were on the market. The English product had achieved pre-eminence 'all over the world by the late sixties, probably because a Greek named Zicaliotti founded in Liverpool a school for women cigarette makers, ousting many hundreds of foreign makers who had flocked to England from abroad. To-day cigarettes are manufactured by machines that cari turn them out at the rate of 1,350 a minute. It is a, stupendous, and to non-smoke.rs a depressing, thought. "Smoking has gone out," Dr. Johnson ohserved to Boswell 150 years ago, describing how manners had changed. "To be i sure, it is a shocking thing, blowing smoke out of your mouths into other people's mouths, eyes and noses, and having the same thing done to us. Yet I cannot account why a thing which requires so little exertion, and yet preserves the mind from total vacuity should have gone out. Every man has something by which he ealms himself, beating with his feet, or so." He could not forsee the revival of smoking which was to come. Figures in the cigarette industry speak inore eloquently than any words. Here are some of them: — More than 160,000,000,000 cigarettes are smoked a year in England alone. Women, 1 it is calculated, smoke 4,000,000,000 of them. In America the annual consumption of cigarettes has risen in 20 years from 15,000,000,000 to close upon 100,000,000,000 of them. Fortunes left by members of the great tobacco family of Wills include: Sir G. A. Wills (July, 1928), £10,000,000 ; Mr. H. O. Wifis (September, 1911), £5,214,821; Mr. F. N. Wills (October, 1927), £5,053,360; Sir Frederick Wills (February, 1909) £3,050,556; Mr: H. H. Wills (May, 1922), £2,750,000; Sir E. P. Wills (March, 1910), £2,633,660.