The History of Vaping: From 1963 to Present

When you look at the pace of technical innovation in the vaping industry, it’s impossible not to be impressed. In most of the world, the first generation of e-cigarettes arrived in stores barely over a decade ago. That’s not a lot of time – and yet, most of today’s vapers would barely recognize an e-cigarette from 10 years ago as a vaping device. That’s how significant the changes have been.

If you’re a newer member of the vaping community and used e-cigarettes to quit smoking, there’s a good chance that you already have a pretty high level of appreciation for the device in your hand. You might appreciate it even more, though, if you knew a bit more about all of the technological milestones that the vaping industry has had to reach over the years in order to get that device into your hand. That’s the focus of this article. We’re going to discuss the history of vaping from the very beginning, and we’re going to highlight some of the most important vaping technologies that have appeared along the way.

As we begin our history of vaping, the first thing you’ll learn is that the idea of vaping is actually quite a bit older than you might think.

Herbert A. Gilbert Created the Original “Smokeless Cigarette” in 1963

Herbert A. Gilbert – a business owner in the scrap metal industry – created the first device that we would recognize as an e-cigarette in his Pennsylvania workshop in 1963. He received a patent for his invention in 1965. Gilbert called his invention the Smokeless Non-Tobacco Cigarette, and he invented it for exactly the same reason that the modern e-cigarette exists today: to help people quit smoking.

Gilbert’s smokeless cigarette contained no nicotine, but it worked in much the same way that today’s e-cigarettes work. It used power from a battery to heat flavoured water. When the water turned to vapour, the user inhaled and exhaled it like smoke. Gilbert created several flavours for his device, including cinnamon, rum and mint. In addition to helping smokers quit, he hoped that his invention would appeal to dieters who might like to inhale sweet flavours instead of eating them.

Unfortunately, Gilbert never found a company willing to produce his product. There was no interest among the tobacco companies in producing a product that would help people quit smoking. In addition, producing a safer product would effectively be an admission that cigarettes were unsafe – something the tobacco companies weren’t willing to do in the 1960s. Pharmacies, likewise, weren’t interested. It’s also debatable whether the battery technology available at the time would have been sufficient to power Gilbert’s device. In the end, the Smokeless Cigarette was a great idea that appeared just a bit too soon.

The Favor Cigarette Sparked the Creation of the Term “Vaping”

In the late 1970s, J. Phillip Ray developed a smokeless cigarette called Favor with the assistance of Dr. Norman L. Jacobson. The Favor cigarette wasn’t an electronic device. Instead, it was a cigarette-shaped plastic tube containing a tissue paper filter impregnated with liquid nicotine. Puffing on the cigarette would release the nicotine into the airstream for absorption via the lungs. One Favor cigarette would last the average smoker about a day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En7ALkrENiA&feature=youtu.be

Favor wasn’t a perfect product. Today, Dr. Jacobson speaks of the problems the company encountered when it came to storing the product; the nicotine would turn bitter if it wasn’t refrigerated. Nevertheless, the Favor cigarette has an important place in history because its creators invented the terms “vaping” and “vaper.” You can see those terms in the original studies that the creators of Favor conducted to prove that the cigarette’s users did, indeed, absorb the nicotine in vapour form through their lungs.

The Favor cigarette did enter mass production, but it was eventually pulled from the market by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The FDA deemed it a new drug that was being marketed without regulatory approval.

The vaping industry in the U.S. encountered the same problem when the first Chinese-made e-cigarettes began to reach U.S. shores in the late 2000s. The FDA confiscated shipments, claiming that e-cigarettes were devices for drug delivery. The e-cigarette company NJOY successfully sued the FDA in 2010, paving the way for vaping products to be sold as tobacco products in the United States.

Hon Lik Started the Modern Vaping Revolution

As fun as it is to look at the earliest attempts to invent the e-cigarette, the fact is that vaping as we know it began with the creation of the first modern e-cigarette in 2003. It was invented by Hon Lik, a Chinese Pharmacist who was a heavy smoker and had recently lost his father to lung cancer. Lik knew that he would eventually suffer the same fate unless he could find – or create – a better way to quit. He had already used nicotine patches, which he found so unsatisfying that he would sometimes forget he was wearing them.

Lik’s original invention wasn’t terribly different from the e-cigarettes that we use today, although its atomization technology was a bit different. Lik’s original design used piezoelectric vibrations to vaporize the e-liquid. Today, we use heating elements.

Hon Lik called his e-cigarette “Ruyan,” which means “like smoking” in Chinese. The product wasn’t particularly successful in China; despite China’s large population of smokers, vaping has never been especially popular there. However, Lik had one thing that the previous would-be inventors of vaping lacked: He had access to China’s massive network of factories, which meant that he could put his idea into production quickly and cheaply.

While the Ruyan e-cigarette met with little success in China, it was incredibly popular in other areas of the world – most notably in the United States and the United Kingdom. With that, the vaping revolution began.

The Cartomizer and Two-Part E-Cigarette Brought Vaping to the Masses

As revolutionary as Hon Lik’s first e-cigarette was, it also had two issues that were quickly resolved as other factories began to create clones of Lik’s product, and those clones were then improved upon with further product iterations. The first problem was the ultrasonic atomizer, which quickly gave way to the more reliable and powerful heating coils that we still use today.

The second problem was the disposable plastic cartridges that the first e-cigarettes used for e-liquid storage. The earliest e-cigarette cartridges were hollow plastic shells. Inside the shell of a cartridge, there would be a sponge soaked with e-liquid. Upon touching the steel mesh bridge of an atomizer, the e-liquid in the sponge would begin to run down to the atomizer’s heating coil.

The plastic cartridge system was problematic because it was wasteful; much of the e-liquid would stay in the sponge rather than running down the steel mesh. The sponge also blocked airflow, reducing the e-cigarette’s vapour production.

The technological advancement that solved the problem was called the “cartomizer,” so called because it combined the e-cigarette’s heating coil and e-liquid storage in a single self-contained unit. A cartomizer stored its e-liquid in fabric gauze. The gauze was wrapped around the heating coil, and since the coil remained in close contact with the e-liquid, it didn’t produce the “dry hits” that were common with the earlier plastic cartridges.

Cartomizer technology is so reliable that it’s still used in virtually all cigarette-shaped e-cigarettes today. It is truly the technology that brought vaping to the masses.

The eGo E-Cigarette Became the Vaping Industry’s Next Signature Product

In the early 2010s, the vaping industry celebrated the launch of what would become its second signature product after the cigalike. The eGo vape pen may not have looked like much on the surface. It was, after all, just a tube with a fire button. That humble tube, however, had two important features. The first feature was the threading at the top of the battery, which enabled it to work with atomizers and tanks of many different types – including many of the pre-filled cartomizers from existing e-cigarette brands.

The second feature of the eGo e-cigarette was the battery itself. While the typical first-generation e-cigarette had a battery capacity of around 100 mAh, the eGo e-cigarette was slightly larger and could have a maximum capacity of about 1,000 mAh and sometimes even higher. The higher battery capacity allowed the eGo e-cigarette to produce larger and more satisfying clouds than any mass-produced vaping product that had come before.

Since the eGo e-cigarette had the 510 threading that would eventually become the industry standard, manufacturers evolved the eGo platform as the tastes of the community changed. Whether people preferred cartomizers, tanks or dripping atomizers, the eGo e-cigarette was the ideal platform. The eGo e-cigarette was so versatile that variations of it remain in production today.

Box Mods Ushered in the Era of Sub-Ohm Vaping

As great as the eGo e-cigarette was for newer vapers, some more experienced vapers eventually began to feel constrained by the platform because it was very limited in terms of the wattage that it could deliver. Experienced vapers wanted to ramp up the vapour production even further by using lower-resistance atomizer coils designed to operate at higher wattages. To do that, they needed vaping devices with more powerful batteries.

The first box mods were simple mechanical devices created by members of the vaping community. Those devices used batteries like the popular 18650 cell, which is common in flashlights and electric vehicles. Before long, though, the factories in China had picked up on the box mod trend and were producing box mods with full power regulation. In addition to variable wattage, those devices included built-in safety features such as automatic monitoring for short circuits and overheating. Box mods remain staples of the vaping industry today, and they’re unlikely to go away any time soon.

Pod Systems and Nicotine Salt Made Switching to Vaping Easier Than Ever

In 2015, the next great era of vaping began with the release of the first nicotine salt e-liquids and pod-based vaping systems. The invention of nicotine salt e-liquid was a revolutionary development because it was milder on the throat than the earliest e-liquids, thus enabling the creation of higher-nicotine e-liquids that didn’t irritate the throat.

Thanks to nicotine salt e-liquid, it was finally possible for the smallest vaping devices to deliver as much nicotine per puff as cigarettes. Previously, a smoker would have to adjust to lower blood-nicotine levels – or use a more powerful vaping device – in order to switch to vaping successfully. With nicotine salt e-liquids, new vapers could use the smallest vaping devices and still be completely satisfied.

Pod-based vaping devices proved to be the ideal companions for nicotine salt e-liquid. People loved the fact that pod-based devices looked distinct from tobacco cigarettes, and the devices were also incredibly easy to use – just push in a pod and vape. Pod systems continue to be the hottest vaping devices in the world today. That’s the case, at least, until the next big revolution comes along and alters the history of vaping yet again.