1. History

American Indians smoked tobacco in pipes long before Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World in 1492. Columbus brought some tobacco seeds back to Europe, where farmers began to grow the plant for use as a medicine that supposedly helped people relax. In 1560, a French diplomat named Jean Nicot—from whom tobacco receives its botanical name, "Nicotiana"—introduced the use of tobacco in France.

Commercial production of tobacco began in North America in 1612, after an English colonist named John Rolfe brought some tobacco seeds from South Carolina to Virginia. The Virginia soil and climate were excellent for tobacco, and it became an important crop there and in other parts of the South.

Most of the tobacco grown in the American Colonies was exported to England until the Revolutionary War began in 1775. Manufacturers in the United States then began to produce smoking tobacco, chewing tobacco, and snuff for domestic use. Cigars were first manufactured in the United States in the early 1800s.

Spaniards and some other Europeans began to smoke hand-rolled cigarettes in the 1600s, but few people in the United States used them until the 1850s. Cigarette smoking became increasingly popular after the first practical cigarette-making machine was invented in the early 1880s.

Hand-rolled cigarettes achieved limited popularity in the United States between 1855 and 1885. They contained either straight Turkish tobacco, straight flue-cured tobacco, or a blend of the two. The first practical cigarette-making machine was invented in the early 1880s. Cigarette companies introduced domestic blends about 30 years later.