99 Fun Facts About Smoking

Charred seeds in an ancient desert hearth show people in North America were using tobacco roughly how long ago?

12,000 years. The find, dated to about 12,300 years ago, pushed the record of tobacco use back by some 9,000 years, to a time when mammoths still roamed the continent.

Rodrigo de Jerez, credited as Europe's first smoker, picked up the habit in Cuba while sailing with which explorer?

Christopher Columbus. He sent Jerez and an interpreter inland in November 1492, and they came back describing people who burned dried leaves and breathed in the smoke.

Under which monarch did the English take up smoking, which they at first called 'drinking' tobacco?

Elizabeth I. Colonists rescued from Roanoke came home in 1586 with the habit, and for years it was 'drunk': 'smoke' in that sense is first recorded only in 1604, in a pamphlet attacking it.

Which French ambassador to Portugal sent tobacco to the French court around 1560, promoting it as a medicine?

Jean Nicot. The court took to it after he reportedly used it on Catherine de' Medici's migraines; botanists then named the plant Nicotiana after him, and nicotine followed.

Which English king wrote 'A Counterblaste to Tobacco' in 1604?

James I. He called smoking 'a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs', and likened its fumes to the smoke of hell.

England's king tried to price tobacco out of reach in 1604 by raising the import duty by roughly how much?

4,000%. A further six shillings and eightpence was laid on every pound of leaf, yet the habit only spread, and the capital soon had thousands of tobacco sellers.

Which Jamestown settler first raised tobacco successfully as a cash crop, in 1612?

John Rolfe. English smokers found Virginia's native leaf too bitter, so he planted milder Caribbean seed instead; he is better remembered today as the husband of Pocahontas.

In the Thirteen Colonies, tobacco served as what in trade with Native Americans?

The crop was so central that Virginia planters paid debts and even taxes in leaf.

Which Ottoman sultan banned smoking across his empire in the 1630s?

Murad IV. He had smokers put to death, but the ban barely outlived him: his successor lifted it and taxed tobacco instead.

Which cartoon characters were used to advertise Winston cigarettes in the early 1960s?

The Flintstones. Fred and Barney lit up for the sponsor during the show's first two seasons; Winston then withdrew, and Welch's grape juice took its place.

The kiseru, a slender pipe with a tiny metal bowl for finely shredded tobacco, is traditional to which country?

Japan. Tobacco reached the country in the late 1500s, and the kiseru, often worked in precious metal as a status symbol, stayed the usual way to smoke until cigarettes arrived after 1868.

Which tobacco tycoon staked his business on the Bonsack cigarette-rolling machine in the 1880s?

James Buchanan Duke. A good hand-roller made a few cigarettes a minute and the machine well over a hundred; the fortune it earned him later endowed the university that bears his family's name.

Which baseball star's refusal to appear on a 1909 cigarette card made it the most famous card in the hobby?

Honus Wagner. Why he objected is disputed, since he chewed tobacco himself, but so few of the cards got out that one sold for more than $3 million in 2016.

In 1890 the five biggest US cigarette makers merged into which giant firm?

The American Tobacco Company. Within sixteen years it controlled four-fifths of the country's tobacco trade outside cigars, and in 1911 the Supreme Court ordered it broken up as a monopoly.

In 1929, publicist Edward Bernays had women light cigarettes in New York's Easter parade and called them what?

Torches of Freedom. Bernays was working for the makers of Lucky Strike, who wanted to break the taboo on women smoking in public and so open up the other half of the market.

Which British researcher's 1950 BMJ paper linked smoking to lung cancer?

Richard Doll. He and Austin Bradford Hill set out suspecting tarmac or car fumes; smoking proved to be the one thing their lung-cancer patients shared, and Doll gave up cigarettes himself.

Which country led the world in research linking smoking to lung cancer during the 1930s?

Germany. The findings fed the Nazi regime's bans on smoking in public places and on tobacco advertising, part of a campaign driven by its obsession with bodily purity.

The 1964 US Surgeon General's report called smoking only a 'habituation'; which word did the office finally use in the 1980s?

Addiction. The 1964 committee hedged, partly because nicotine's hold on smokers was not yet understood, and it took a quarter of a century for a Surgeon General to say the word.

Starting on 2 January 1971, the US banned cigarette advertising in which media?

Television and radio. The ban began on 2 January rather than New Year's Day so that broadcasters could sell cigarette commercials during the college bowl games one last time.

Which country smokes more than two of every five cigarettes sold in the world?

China. As of 2022 its 300 million or so smokers were getting through well over two trillion cigarettes a year, in a country where a carton is still a welcome gift on almost any occasion.

Roughly how many different chemicals are found in tobacco smoke?

7,000. At least 69 of them are known to cause cancer, and several also turn up in products that have to carry warning labels, such as rat poison.

According to the World Health Organization, tobacco kills roughly how many people worldwide every year?

7 million. That is the WHO's estimate as of 2026, and it includes more than 1.6 million people who never smoked at all but breathed in other people's smoke.

Approximately how many cigarettes are smoked worldwide each year?

5.6 trillion. That is roughly 700 a year for every person on the planet, and the World Health Organization reckons that the remains of some 4.5 trillion of them are simply dropped.

The filters in cigarette butts are mostly made of what?

Plastic. The fibres are cellulose acetate, which is slow to break down, so dropped butts pile up in gutters and on beaches, leaking the toxins they trapped.

Which country banned the sale of all tobacco products in 2004, thought to be a world first?

Bhutan. The Buddhist kingdom hoped to become a smoke-free nation, though tourists and diplomats were exempt; in 2021 its parliament made selling tobacco legal again.

Which country was first to put picture warnings on cigarette packs, in 2001?

Canada. Its sixteen warnings covered half of every pack, and one set a photograph of a diseased lung beside the line that 85% of lung cancers are caused by smoking.

Which country introduced the world's first nationwide smoking ban in workplaces and pubs, in 2004?

Ireland. Publicans called the ban unenforceable and pubs across the border hoped to pick up the smokers, yet within little more than three years the whole United Kingdom had copied it.

Which cigarette brand, launched for women in 1968, used the slogan 'You've come a long way, baby'?

Virginia Slims. Its adverts borrowed the language of women's liberation, and from 1970 the brand also bankrolled the breakaway women's tennis circuit that grew into today's WTA Tour.

Which US state passed the first law restricting smoking in most public spaces, in 1975?

Minnesota. The state's doctors and a non-smokers' association lobbied the Clean Indoor Air Act into law, and it was widened again in 2007 by the Freedom to Breathe Act.

Australia's plain cigarette packs, introduced in December 2012, are what colour?

Olive drab. Researchers picked the murky shade as the least appealing they could find; officials first called it olive green, until the country's olive growers objected, and now say drab dark brown.

The 1998 Master Settlement Agreement committed big US tobacco firms to pay states at least how much over 25 years?

$206 billion. The deal settled lawsuits by 46 states over the cost of treating sick smokers, and it also set up the group behind the 'truth' anti-smoking adverts aimed at teenagers.

In a 1991 study, six-year-olds recognised cigarette mascot Joe Camel about as readily as which children's logo?

The Disney Channel logo. More than nine in ten six-year-olds matched the cartoon camel to a cigarette; a lawsuit and a federal complaint followed, and R. J. Reynolds dropped him in 1997.

Marlboro cigarettes take their name from a street in which city?

London. Philip Morris began as a Bond Street tobacconist, and the firm's later factory on Great Marlborough Street lent its name, minus a few letters, to the cigarette launched in 1924.

What slogan sold Marlboro as a women's cigarette in the 1920s and 1930s?

Mild as May. The adverts promised women 'Ivory Tips' that would protect their lips and spare their lipstick, and the brand also tried tips dyed red.

Which rugged figure became the lasting face of Marlboro adverts from the 1950s, remaking a women's brand for men?

A cowboy. The Marlboro Man campaign turned the brand's image around within months, and by 1972 Marlboro was the best-selling cigarette in the world.

'Old Joe', the dromedary pictured on packs of Camel cigarettes since 1913, was a real animal that belonged to what?

A travelling circus. By the company's own account he would not hold still for the photographer until his trainer slapped his nose, which is why the camel on the pack has its tail up and its ears back.

According to the Camel brand's decades-old slogan, what would a smoker do for a Camel?

The brand blends Turkish and Virginia tobaccos.

Which Lucky Strike slogan, credited to Don Draper in Mad Men's 1960-set pilot, actually dates from 1917?

It's Toasted. The slogan boasted that the brand's leaf was heat-cured rather than simply dried in the sun, a process its makers claimed took the harsh irritants out of the smoke.

Which industrial designer turned the Lucky Strike pack from green to white in the early 1940s?

Raymond Loewy. He took the job as a $50,000 bet with the company's president that he could improve the pack, and smokers were told that the old green had 'gone to war'.

Which queen, nicknamed 'Snuffy', kept an entire room at Windsor Castle for her stock of snuff?

Queen Charlotte. George III's wife was so devoted to the habit that when her belongings were auctioned after her death, even the leftover snuff went under the hammer at Christie's.

Among snuff-takers, a sneeze after sniffing is traditionally seen as a sign of what?

A beginner. Practised users sniff only into the front of the nose; newcomers and the drier snuffs produce the most sneezes, which is why snuff sellers also stock handkerchiefs.

A cigar's ring gauge measures its diameter in what units?

Sixty-fourths of an inch. So a ring gauge of 64 would mean a cigar a full inch across, and the stubby robusto, at 50, is a little over three-quarters of an inch.

Nicotine has been used since at least 1690 as what?

An insecticide. The tobacco plant makes nicotine to poison the insects that eat it, and chemists later copied its structure for the neonicotinoid sprays now blamed for harming bees.

In the 1890s, a disease that mottles tobacco leaves led scientists to discover the first known what?

Virus. Sap from sick plants stayed infectious after passing through filters fine enough to stop any bacterium, and in 1898 Martinus Beijerinck gave the unseen agent its name.

Fishermen visiting from which present-day country brought tobacco smoking to northern Australia in the 1700s?

Indonesia. Crews from Makassar sailed south to gather sea cucumbers, and traded tobacco, cloth and metal tools with Aboriginal people before any British colony existed there.

Tobacco is a botanical relative of which food crop?

Tomato. Both belong to the nightshade family, and the kinship shows: tomatoes, potatoes and aubergines carry traces of nicotine too, at least 100,000 times less than tobacco does.

According to the World Health Organization, how soon after a last cigarette do heart rate and blood pressure drop?

20 minutes. The repair work then goes on for years: a decade after quitting, the risk of lung cancer is about half that of someone who is still smoking.

By one tradition, the hookah was invented at the court of which Mughal emperor after tobacco reached India?

Akbar. The story credits his physician with passing the smoke through water to purify it; another account has the pipe beginning in Persia, where it later took its modern shape.

Which cigar-loving statesman has a classic seven-inch cigar size named after him?

Winston Churchill. The Cuban maker Romeo y Julieta named its long flagship cigar in honour of its most famous devotee, and the name is now a standard size across the trade.

What must be fitted on or beside every airliner lavatory door under US rules, even though smoking on board is banned?

An ashtray is compulsory because anyone who lights up anyway needs somewhere safer to stub out than a bin full of paper towels. A 1973 airliner fire may have started with a cigarette dropped in a toilet waste bin.

Which fictional detective's famous curved calabash pipe never actually appears in the original stories?

Sherlock Holmes smokes only clay, briar and cherrywood pipes on the page. A curved pipe arrived with the stage, where a bent stem let an actor deliver his lines without the bowl hiding his mouth.

Kent cigarettes' much-advertised 'Micronite' filter of the early 1950s contained which hazardous material?

Asbestos, of the especially dangerous blue kind, went into a filter that was marketed as a health breakthrough. The maker quietly switched to an ordinary filter material in 1956.

Which giant airship of the 1930s, filled with flammable hydrogen, had a pressurised smoking room on board?

Hindenburg kept its smoking room at raised pressure so that leaking hydrogen could not seep in. The only way out was through the bar, where a steward checked that nobody left with a lit cigarette or pipe.

Rescue kits set out in the 1780s were used to blow tobacco smoke into which part of a drowning victim?

The rectum was the target, because warm smoke was thought to stimulate a lifeless body. The Royal Humane Society installed the kits at points along the River Thames.

Which Belgian surrealist painted a tobacco pipe above a caption declaring that it is not a pipe?

René Magritte called the 1929 painting The Treachery of Images. Challenged about the caption, he pointed out that nobody could stuff tobacco into his pipe, because it was only a picture of one.

Which US president had an aide round up 1,200 Cuban cigars the night before he signed the trade embargo?

John F. Kennedy sent Pierre Salinger round the tobacconists of Washington to buy every box of H. Upmann cigars he could find. Only with the stock secured did the ban on Cuban goods get its signature.

Which poisonous gas, found in both cigarette smoke and car exhaust, cuts the blood's ability to carry oxygen?

Carbon monoxide grips the haemoglobin in red blood cells about 240 times more tightly than oxygen does. A smoker's blood can hold over three times as much of the gas as a non-smoker's.

Britain's first No Smoking Day, in 1984, fell on which day of the Christian calendar?

Ash Wednesday opens Lent, the weeks when many Christians give something up, so the date suited a quitting campaign twice over. No Smoking Day later settled on the second Wednesday in March.

Which New York detective of 1970s crime drama sucked lollipops to cut down on his cigarettes?

Kojak first swapped a cigarette for a Tootsie Pop while questioning a witness in a 1973 episode. The sweet became the character's trademark, although he carried on lighting cigarillos as well.

What name is given to the sticky residue of burnt tobacco that blackens teeth and damages a smoker's lungs?

Tar is a cocktail of burnt particles, not a single chemical, and it also dulls the taste buds. US cigarette makers often print the word in quotation marks to distance it from the stuff that surfaces roads.

In a hookah, what does the tobacco smoke pass through before it reaches the smoker's mouthpiece?

Water cools the smoke and makes it feel smoother, but it does little to remove the chemicals that do the most harm. By tradition, its inventor hoped the bubbling bath would purify every puff.

What term describes the tobacco residue that lingers on furniture, clothing and dust after a cigarette is out?

Thirdhand smoke was named by a cancer research team linked to Harvard for the film left behind once the air has cleared. It can cling on for a long time, even after airing and ordinary cleaning.

Which chemical in tobacco smoke is better known as the fluid used to embalm bodies and preserve lab specimens?

Formaldehyde forms whenever plant material such as tobacco burns, and it is classed as a known cause of cancer. The same chemical turns up in car exhaust and the smoke of forest fires.

Which lung disease, common in long-term smokers, breaks down the walls of the tiny air sacs called alveoli?

Emphysema leaves empty spaces where spongy lung tissue used to be, so less oxygen can pass into the blood. The damage builds slowly, which is why it mostly appears in middle age or later.

Which cooling flavouring did Ohio's Lloyd 'Spud' Hughes first add to cigarettes in the 1920s?

Menthol cigarettes went nationwide under the brand name Spud once a tobacco firm bought the Hughes patent in 1927. Within five years Spud was the fifth best-selling brand in the United States.

Snus, a moist tobacco tucked under the upper lip, is banned from sale across the EU except in which country?

Sweden kept its snus under the terms on which it joined the European Union. Everywhere else in the bloc, tobacco made for use in the mouth cannot be put on the market.

In French, Italian and many other European languages, the word 'smoking' means which item of clothing?

A tuxedo, or dinner jacket, evolved from the Victorian smoking jacket, and the English word travelled abroad with the new garment. Men first wore smoking jackets to keep smoke and ash off their clothes.

Which Marx brother's stage look combined an ever-present cigar with a thick greasepaint moustache and eyebrows?

Groucho carried the look over from his vaudeville days and only later grew a real moustache to replace the painted one. A stooped, loping walk and a stream of insults completed the act.

Which actress carries an oversized cigarette holder as Holly Golightly in the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany's?

Audrey Hepburn posing with the holder, her hair piled high, became one of the most recognised images in American cinema. Truman Capote, who wrote the story, had wanted Marilyn Monroe for the part.

Which windproof American lighter, made in Bradford, Pennsylvania, comes with an unlimited lifetime guarantee?

Zippo promises to repair any of its lighters free, however old or battered. The click of the metal lid is so familiar that the company registered it as a sound trademark in 2018.

What is the name of the box, typically lined with Spanish cedar, that keeps cigars from drying out?

A humidor holds the air inside at a steady humidity, hence the name. It can be anything from a small desktop box for a few dozen cigars to a walk-in room at a tobacconist's.

Which Florida city's Ybor City district rolled so many cigars that it earned the nickname 'Cigar City'?

Tampa grew from a depressed village into a bustling city in about 20 years on the wages of its cigar workers. Factory owner Vicente Martinez-Ybor began buying land there in 1885, and rollers followed him from Key West.

Which novel, said to be a favourite read aloud to Cuban cigar rollers, gave a famous cigar brand its name?

The Count of Monte Cristo was reportedly much requested by the rollers, who listened to a reader hired to entertain them at their benches. A later cigar in the range, the Edmundo, is named after the novel's hero.

Which Civil War general and US president, a frequent cigar smoker, died of throat cancer in 1885?

Ulysses S. Grant spent his last months writing his memoirs, which became a critical and financial success after his death. His frequent cigar smoking is thought a possible cause of the cancer.

Which cigar-loving Viennese doctor, a smoker from the age of 24, needed repeated operations on his cancerous jaw?

Sigmund Freud believed that smoking sharpened his capacity for work and that he could keep it in check by self-control. He brushed off a colleague's health warnings and remained a smoker.

Which British king, on the throne throughout the Second World War, lost a lung after years of heavy smoking?

George VI had his left lung removed in September 1951 after surgeons found a malignant tumour. He died in his sleep of a blood clot in the heart less than five months later, aged 56.

Which 1990s sci-fi series pits two FBI agents against a shadowy villain called the Cigarette Smoking Man?

The X-Files left him nameless, crediting him simply as Smoking Man in the pilot episode. He is almost always seen chain-smoking Morleys, a made-up brand that turns up in many other shows and films.

In which opera does the heroine work as a cigarette maker at the Royal Tobacco Factory in Seville?

Carmen and her fellow cigarette girls pour out at the factory bell to banter with the young men in the square. The real building has been the headquarters of the University of Seville since the 1950s.

Which Dutch painter's early works include a skeleton with a lit cigarette clamped between its teeth?

Vincent van Gogh probably painted it in the winter of 1885–86 to mock the dry skeleton studies at Antwerp's art academy. It was no health warning: he was a keen smoker until his death.

Kretek cigarettes, named after the crackling sound they make as they burn, blend tobacco with which spice?

Cloves crackle as they burn, and the word kretek imitates the noise. Their Javanese inventor, troubled by chest pains around 1880, had first tried rubbing clove oil on his chest.

Bidis, the thin hand-rolled smokes of the Indian subcontinent, are commonly wrapped in which kind of leaf?

Tendu leaves make such good wrappers that the bidi owes part of its success to them. Each leaf is rolled around flakes of tobacco and tied at one end with string.

Which Cuban cigar brand began in the 1960s as a private supply for Fidel Castro and his top officials?

Cohiba grew out of cigars rolled by a local craftsman that a bodyguard shared with Castro. For years only a few thousand boxes were made annually, many of them handed out as diplomatic gifts.

Which San Diego Padres hitter got salivary gland cancer where he had kept dipping tobacco for decades?

Tony Gwynn died of the cancer in 2014, aged 54. His death raised awareness of the habit across baseball and led to a 2016 league-wide ban on smokeless tobacco for new players.

The phrase 'smoke-filled room' dates from the 1920 Republican convention that picked which presidential nominee?

Warren G. Harding was a minor candidate until, legend has it, party power-brokers settled on him in a private meeting at Chicago's Blackstone Hotel. A news agency report of the rumours gave politics the phrase.

Which Scottish city grew rich in the 1700s through 'Tobacco Lords' who traded with the American colonies?

Glasgow's merchants made such fortunes that they took on the style of aristocrats, building lavish townhouses and churches. Part of the money came from the direct ownership of enslaved people.

Which New England state gives its name to the 'shade' tobacco grown under tents for cigar wrappers?

Connecticut shade leaf dates from 1900, when growers tested over thirty seed samples from Cuba and Sumatra and raised the first tent in the town of Windsor. It is prized for its colour and subtle sweetness.

Which Nordic city gives its name to an American brand of moist snuff first made in Pittsburgh in 1822?

Copenhagen snuff was first produced by George Weyman in Pittsburgh, and its original fine cut has stayed on sale for two centuries. In 2007 its makers launched a side brand under the nickname Cope.

Which American five-star general was famous for smoking corncob pipes?

Douglas MacArthur shares the title of best-known corncob smoker with Mark Twain. The pipes are a Missouri speciality: a firm in the town of Washington is the oldest and largest maker in the world.

Which British prime minister, voted Pipe Smoker of the Year in 1965, privately preferred cigars?

Harold Wilson's pipe belonged to a carefully homely image, along with his Gannex raincoat and a taste for HP Sauce. His widow asked that his statue leave the pipe out, fearing it would look like a caricature.

Which reward chemical in the brain does nicotine release, helping to make cigarettes so hard to give up?

Dopamine is released along the brain's reward pathway, producing a brief lift in mood. Nicotine gets there fast, crossing from the lungs into the brain within 10 to 20 seconds of a puff.

Which tiny hair-like sweepers in the airways stop working and die when tobacco residue coats them?

Cilia beat in waves, about 200 to a cell, to sweep mucus and trapped dirt up and away from the lungs. Once they fail, the toxic particles in smoke pass straight down into the air sacs.

'Fire-safe' cigarettes have bands of less porous paper that make them do what when a smoker stops puffing?

Go out quickly, in short: two or three bands of less porous paper act as speed bumps that the burning tip struggles to cross. The design is meant to prevent fires started by forgotten cigarettes.

Which radioactive element, used to poison ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, is also found in tobacco smoke?

Polonium turns up in the smoke of tobacco grown with phosphate fertilisers, giving smokers an extra dose of radiation. Marie Curie, who discovered the element, named it after her homeland of Poland.

Smoking thorn apple leaves, in a cigarette or a pipe, was long thought to relieve which breathing condition?

Asthma was treated by smoking herbs from antiquity into the early twentieth century, and one Victorian textbook on the illness discussed the remedy. Cigarette smoke in fact makes the condition harder to control.

What is the name for the brass bowl once common in saloons and hotels for the use of tobacco chewers?

A spittoon stands beside the seat of every justice in the US Supreme Court's courtroom, where it serves as a wastebasket. Vast numbers of the old brass ones went into the scrap drives of the Second World War.

The 'anatomical snuffbox', a hollow once used to hold a pinch of snuff, lies at the base of which digit?

The thumb shows the hollow at its base most clearly when it is stretched out. Tenderness there points a doctor to a likely fracture of the scaphoid, the small bone beneath.

The tobacco hornworm, a bright green caterpillar that feeds on the crop's leaves, grows up to be which insect?

A hawk moth, also called the Carolina sphinx, is the adult form. As a caterpillar it can break down the plant's nerve poison and even turn it into a defence against predators.

Which English explorer, a populariser of pipe smoking, left a tobacco pouch behind in his cell at his execution?

Walter Raleigh was beheaded at Westminster in 1618, and the pouch was found in his cell soon afterwards. Its Latin inscription called it his companion in that most miserable time.

In Australian and New Zealand slang, what is a 'smoko'?

A work break of any kind can be a smoko, even one for tea with no cigarette in sight. Among sheep shearers it is the mid-morning pause, when a light meal may be eaten.