Why Was The Electronic Cigarette Invented? | UK Vape Scene

For people looking to stop smoking, vaping has become a vital tool to help stop craving and avoid the pitfalls of nicotine withdrawal at your own pace, particularly when alternative treatments such as patches, gum and lozenges have been found wanting.

With the help of flavoured vape juice and refillable tanks, vaping can help you fight cravings, save money compared to tobacco and give you much greater control over your nicotine intake.

This has made it effective as a nicotine replacement therapy, but that was just one of the reasons why its inventor, Dr Hon Lik, developed the patent for the modern e-cigarette.

Dealing With Loss And Loneliness

Whilst not the first person to conceive of the idea of a substitute cigarette, with recognisable patents as early as the 1960s and products on the market in the 1980s, Dr Lik was the first to develop an effective vape that had a similar feel to cigarettes to ease with the transition.

The first brick that built what would become the e-cigarette, however, was his upbringing and his father. His father was a regular smoker, as was particularly typical in China in general and particularly in the rapidly industrialising Shenyang city he grew up in.

He started smoking at 18 and for the rest of the century would not stop. It was a way to deal with the loneliness and isolation of his studies away from his family, and would later become a coping mechanism when his father started to suffer the effect of lung cancer from his own habit.

Ultimately, he would quit his 60-a-day habit due to the effects the cancer was having on his dad, but he found the road away from cigarettes far from easy.

Battling A Cigarette Culture

Despite attempts to intensify anti-smoking regulations in the People’s Republic, smoking is highly prevalent in China; it is by far the largest consumer and producer of tobacco products, with around 300m of the 1.4b people in the country smoking.

There is a huge social dimension to smoking, which under the guanxi system of social networking means an added business dimension as well, particularly outside the biggest cities of the People’s Republic.

In a more rural or industrialised area such as Dr Lik’s Liaoning province, smoking is extremely common and there is an expectation to give and receive cigarettes as gifts.

Given that around the world one of the biggest causes of tobacco addiction and the health problems that result from it is peer pressure, this was something that was impossible for Dr Hon Lik or his father to navigate.

Rather tragically, Dr Lik’s resolution to quit smoking was the exception rather than the norm; most smokers quit because they are forced to by chronic illness.

This was a huge uphill battle, one that Dr Lik would dedicate himself to helping to fight once his father finally lost the battle in 2004.

A Nightmare Before The Dream

Once Dr Lik decided to quit, he first tried nicotine patches, which were at the time the most widely available stop-smoking aid.

The idea behind them is that they constantly deliver a small supply of nicotine throughout the day, with the idea that they take the edge off cravings enough to make it possible to get through the day without smoking.

They work for many people, but they are not universally effective, even if their ease of use and lack of side effects make them often the first choice in stop-smoking clinics.

Some people get particularly strong cravings in a way that even stronger patches cannot necessarily help with and this was partially the case with Dr Lik. Like many other smokers, he needed that sharp, strong intake of nicotine to relieve his cravings rather than a regular dose.

The final straw for him and the drive to develop an alternative approach to nicotine replacement was one night in 2002 when he suffered from particularly unpleasant nightmares.

He traced it to a nicotine patch he had accidentally left on his stomach and decided that he needed to develop something new that would give him nicotine as and when he needed it.

The Digital Camera Of Smoking

One of the biggest reasons why Dr Lik invented vaping was that he wanted to modernise smoking.

He realised that people were likely to always need to smoke or at least take in nicotine, and decided that if people were always going to smoke something, it should at least be safer and more technologically advanced.

It seems to have worked; whilst Dr Lik still technically smokes, he only does so to compare the flavours between tobacco-flavoured e-liquids and cigarettes.