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A Short History of the Cigarette
Smoking first began perhaps thousands of years ago in Mexico and Brazil. Smoking as a daily habit, however, did not begin until Europeans discovered it after they landed in North and South America about 500 years ago. In 1875, an American company, called ‘Allen and Ginter’, offered to give $US75,000 to anyone who could make a machine that could make cigarettes. Five years later, in 1880, an American named James Bonsack did just that – he invented a machine that could make 200 cigarettes each minute – many more than the four cigarettes per minute a person could make. That was equal to 120,000 cigarettes each ten-hour working day. One year later, the cigarette factory had produced ten million cigarettes, and with his business partner, James Duke, he later created the American Tobacco Company.
By 1900, few people smoked, but this changed during World War 1 and World War 2 when cigarette companies gave soldiers free cigarettes. In 1944, those companies were making 300 billion cigarettes every year. As smoking became more and more popular, an American government report in 1964 said that smoking was very bad for people’s health. As a result, all American cigarette packages had to have a warning label that says smoking is dangerous. They(1) still do. Furthermore, since 1998, Americans under the age of 18 (and in some states 19) are not allowed to buy cigarettes. Nowadays, fewer and fewer people in the U.S. smoke. That’s good news for most people, but not for the cigarette companies who want to make more money. Therefore, to continue making money, they(2) are now selling more cigarettes to many other countries where the number of smokers is actually rising. Researchers say that, between the years 2000 and 2100, about one billion people will die because of smoking.
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