E-cigarettes as we know them now entered the US market around 2007 and within just seven years, their popularity soared to become ‘the most commonly used tobacco product among US youth’.
But despite vapes making a name for themselves in the 2010s and beyond, vaping was invented way earlier than you’d think.
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In fact, CASAA (The Consumer Advocates for Smoke-free Alternatives Association), have explained that the first documented evidence of an electronic cigarette was a patent attributed to Joseph Robinson in 1930.
Despite the document actually being filed three years before the 1930s, the design never came to fruition and was not brought into the commercial market.
It’s not clear whether a prototype of this initial e-cig, which featured a rocket-resembling design and was dubbed an ‘Electric Vaporizer’, was ever even produced.
Some 35 years later, Herbert A. Gilbert received a patent and created prototypes for the first vaping device which most closely resembles the e-cigs we know and love today.
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In an interview with ashtray blog, Gilbert stated how he came up with the idea ‘to find a way to replace burning tobacco and paper with heated, moist, flavoured air’ as people no longer ‘wanted’ the smoke from traditional cigarettes which would ‘go into your lungs’.
However, the inventor never quite entered the commercial market with the product as he believes the cigarette companies would have rather waited for the patent to expire rather than licensing his product.
“I showed it [the design] to chemical companies, pharmaceutical companies and tobacco companies and they did what they did to try to protect their markets,” Gilbert also explained of how he believed he was ‘ahead of his time’.
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In the late 1970s, Phil Ray, a computing expert, worked alongside his personal physician, Norman Jacobson, to come up with the first commercial product based on the e-cigarette.
The product was picked up by major retailers, but the ‘vape’ - a word which the inventors originally coined - was not a good vessel for nicotine delivery.
Fast forward to 2003, and the first successful e-cigarette in the commercial market was created in Beging, China by Hon Lik, a pharmacist, inventor and smoker.
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Lik reportedly came up with the invention after his father died of lung cancer, with his company, Golden Dragon Holdings, developed the machine and called it Ruyan, meaning ‘like smoke’.
In April 2006, electronic cigarettes were introduced to Europe, while they sailed across the pond to the US in August that same year - and the rest is history.
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Gabriella Ferlita