The e-cigarette was first patented in 1963, four decades before it caught on
Hon Lik's 2003 patent is usually cited as the birth of the modern e-cigarette, but an American named Herbert A. Gilbert filed for a smokeless, tobacco-free cigarette in 1963. It puffed flavoured steam without nicotine and went nowhere, because smoking was still fashionable. Half a century later, Gilbert said modern devices follow his basic design.
Every e-cigarette has three parts: a battery, a container such as a tank or cartridge, and an atomizer, a heating element that turns a liquid into a fine aerosol. That e-liquid is typically 95% propylene glycol and glycerin, with nicotine, flavourings and other additives making up the rest; there are more than 15,000 flavours. Heating can also produce by-products such as formaldehyde and acrolein, and metal parts can shed traces of lead or nickel into the vapour.
Designs are sorted into generations. The first, nicknamed cigalikes, imitated cigarettes. Later ones grew bigger, then came mechanical mods, variable voltage and sub-ohm tanks with resistance below one ohm. Pod devices switched to protonated nicotine for higher yields, and nicotine salts made with acids such as benzoic acid reduce throat irritation.
The idea surfaced repeatedly. Joseph Robinson patented an electric vaporizer for medicines in 1930 that was never sold. In 1986 a company launched Favor, a plastic tube shaped like a cigarette holding nicotine-soaked filter paper, dreamed up by Phil Ray, a co-founder of Datapoint and one of the inventors of the microprocessor. The FDA claimed jurisdiction in 1987 and Favor disappeared, but Ray's wife Brenda Coffee left a lasting legacy: she coined the word vaping.
After arriving on the market around 2003, vaping spread fast, from about 7 million adult users worldwide in 2011 to 82 million in 2021, with China home to the most. Among American teenagers use peaked in 2019 and had fallen sharply by 2024, when cigarette smoking among them hit a record low. Whether vaping leads young people toward cigarettes is still argued over, since shared traits like risk-taking can drive both.
Source: Electronic cigarette
