The earliest forms of cigarettes were largely made of dickies
from their predecessor, the cigar. Cigarettes have been attested in Central
America around the 9th century in the form of reeds and smoking tubes. The
Maya, and later the Aztecs, smoked tobacco and various psychoactive drugs in
religious rituals and frequently depicted priests and deities smoking on
pottery and temple engravings. The cigarette and the cigar were the most common
methods of smoking in the Caribbean, Mexico and Central and South America until
recent times.
The South and Central American cigarette used various plant
wrappers; when it was brought back to Spain, maize wrappers were introduced,
and by the 17th century, fine paper. The resulting product was called papelate
and is documented in Goya's paintings La Cometa, La Merienda en el Manzanares,
and El juego de la pelota a pala (18th century). By 1830, the cigarette had
crossed into France, where it received the name cigarette; and in 1845, the
French state tobacco monopoly began manufacturing them.
Production jumped markedly when a cigarette-making machine
was developed in the 1880s by James Albert Bonsack that vastly increased the
productivity of cigarette companies, who went from making approximately 40,000
hand-rolled cigarettes daily to around 4 million. In the English-speaking
world, the use of tobacco in cigarette form became increasingly popular during
and after the Crimean War, when British soldiers began emulating their Ottoman
Turkish comrades and Russian enemies, who had begun rolling and smoking tobacco
in strips of old newspaper for lack of proper cigar-rolling leaf. This was
helped by the development of tobaccos that are suitable for cigarette use, and
by the development of the Egyptian cigarette export industry.
