Why Was Vape Technology Not Available Half A Century Sooner?

From the mid-2010s up until now, vaping has surged in popularity, aided by the arrival of a wide variety of vape juices, devices and studies which demonstrated their efficacy to help stop smokers from returning to the deadly habit.

The NHS cites a study that claims that people who used a vape device alongside expert support were twice as likely to stop smoking compared to patches, gum and other nicotine replacement therapy treatments.

The modern vape can be credited to Dr Hon Lik, who ironically devised what he would later describe as the “digital camera” of smoking as the result of nightmares induced by leaving a nicotine patch on his arm as he slept.

Despite this, he was not the first person to invent a tobacco-free cigarette. Four decades before him, a pioneering inventor developed and patented a remarkably similar device.

The problem is that he was slightly too far ahead of his time.

Birth Of The Smokeless

Born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, Mr Gilbert was, like so many people up until there was a concerted effort to bring about a smoke-free generation, a regular smoker until his 60s, when he finally quit a 40 cigarettes a day habit.

Even in his 30s, however, and in a period between the first studies that confirmed a link between tobacco and lung cancer, and the 1964 Surgeon General's warning that stated smoking caused cancer, Mr Gilbert came to a similar conclusion.

Based on the discomfort of inhaling the smoke from burning leaves in a garden, he believed that if you replaced burning with heated moist air with the same flavour, you could avoid a lot of the harm of smoking.

He developed a prototype which remarkably resembled a modern e-cigarette in terms of form and function, and showed it to any company that might have been capable of producing it and interested in doing so.

It could have potentially changed the world. So why did it not?

Half Of A Solution

Part of the tragedy of Mr Gilbert's Smokeless device was that it was so close to the answer. It was the other half of the solution that the Favor smoke-free cigarette was missing.

Mr Gilbert believed that the answer to stopping smoking was to provide the same taste and sensation, and proposed that the same device could be used to lose weight using similar logic.

Unfortunately, he did not know about the effects of nicotine at the time, and therefore it was questionable as to whether the device, as designed, would have been as effective had it reached the mass market as its potential and clear influence on modern vapes would suggest.

However, there was a much bigger reason why it did not get this chance.

Swimming Against The Current

Smokeless was patented in 1963, during a peak period for highly aggressive tobacco marketing and advertising around the world that lasted until the 1990s and the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA).

At the time, smoking was seen as glamorous (despite the harm it caused), rebellious (despite the reliance on peer pressure) and something that makes the user look desirable and alluring, and so a smoke-free cigarette was seen as somewhat antithetical.

Whilst many tobacco companies would later invest in the e-cigarette market once the MSA made smoking less profitable, at the time Mr Gilbert's invention was seen as potentially threatening to the tobacco industry, were it to actually become successful.

Part of this would have been, as e-cigarettes later would, by offering a less harmful, more pleasant solution to burning tobacco, but a bigger issue would have come via implication.

An Admission Of Guilt

Part of the problem a tobacco company would have had with producing the Smokeless is that the best way to market it is as a healthier smoke-free cigarette. This would naturally imply that tobacco cigarettes are unhealthy by association.

A decade after the Smokeless ultimately faded into obscurity, the concerted misinformation campaign Operation Berkshire (officially confirmed in 1998) aimed to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt on the increasingly undeniable consensus surrounding the harms of Tobacco.

This was far from new, with A Frank Statement in 1954 forming the genesis of this approach to deny the claims that smoking causes harm.

This would reach its peak in 1994 when the CEOs of the seven biggest tobacco companies in the United States collectively lied under oath about nicotine being addictive.

At this time, releasing the Smokeless would have exposed that cigarettes were harmful, so it would ultimately not receive the wide release it should have.