Cigarettes are one of the most carefully designed small objects on the planet. But it was not an easy thing to get people to smoke. To make smoking as ordinary as, say, eating carrots or drinking orange juice, you needed an elaborate marketing and promoting apparatus, the likes of which the world had never seen. People also had to learn how to smoke. And while this is easy enough in a world of ubiquitous smoking peers and visual models (just look at today’s Hollywood films), there was a time when people had to be taught how to smoke. In the 1930s the American Tobacco Company organized classes for such purposes, directed principally at women. Company reps used dolls to demonstrate the proper way of holding, lighting, and smoking a cigarette, and some of these manikins can be found on display in tobacco museums. The saturation of film and virtually every other medium with smoking has to be seen in this light: smoking had to be made socially acceptable, and huge budgets were devoted to this cause.
Anthropologists like to talk about “material culture,” meaning the diverse ways physical objects are built into the daily life of a people. The material culture of smoking has a long and complex history, appreciated best perhaps by the collectors of tobacciana, comprising the endless variety of pipes, cards, silks, lighters, humidors, matchbooks and cigar boxes, wooden Indians, tobacco tins, posters, advertisements, and other paraphernalia that now fill the world’s (mostly industry-run) tobacco museums. Collectors prize the well-made meerschaum pipe, the lighter carved in a World War I trench, the agate snuff box cut for the European aristocrat, the minstrel-era matchbox or tobacco tin.
But cigarettes have been built into life in many other ways. The front shirt pocket that now adorns the dress of virtually every American male, for example, was born from an effort to make a place to park your cigarette pack. Alternate uses of course have become common—just as we now plug electronic devices into holes once meant for lighters—but the fossil function testifies to the intrusive power of the cigarette and to how easily we overlook the origins of everyday objects. There are many other examples. Germans still talk about male formal wear as a “Smoking” (jacket), and in many parts of Europe you get your newspaper from “Le Tabac.” My vote for the creepiest goes to the U.S. military, which in the wake of the Korean War outfitted war-wounded veterans with artificial arms housing built-in cigarette lighters.
VENDING MACHINES AND ASHTRAYS
Vending machines may already seem like an anachronism, but for more than sixty years they were a prime source of cigarettes in the United States, especially for young people, who could get their fix of sticks in perfect anonymity by simply dropping in a few coins. Early vending machines dispensed gum and other novelties—the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives 1895 as the first known use of the expression—but prior even to its breakup in 1911 American Tobacco owned a controlling share in the Garson Vending Machine Company, part of its effort to control all links in the cigar and cigarette supply chain. Patents for the automatic dispensing of cigarettes and cigars date from the 1880s, but serious exploitation of such devices doesn’t really begin until after the First World War, when skyrocketing consumption and standardization of packaging led to new commercial opportunities. An American by the name of William Rowe invented an improved cigarette vending machine in 1926, and by 1938 the Rowe Cigarette Service Company of New York was operating 14,000 dispensers in twenty-two U.S. cities. Coin-operated sales grew steadily up through the late 1970s, when 875,000 machines in the United States were bringing in $2.7 billion in annual cigarette business. This was an effective way to move product, and companies paid a premium to place their brands in favored spots inside the machines (center column was best) and in high-traffic areas of a store or a city. Nothing was left to chance; the industry’s archives preserve detailed calculations of how placement or on-the-machine advertising would affect sales. Cigarette companies also paid for lobbyists to defend such machines when efforts arose to have them banned.
Vending machines were often criticized for making it too easy for children to get cigarettes, and in 1988 Surgeon General C. Everett Koop urged a ban on all such devices. Trade associations fought back, with the Amusement and Music Operators Association distributing brochures with titles like “A Responsible Program for Cigarette Vending Machines,” recommending ways to block youth access. The whole point of these machines was to automate sales, however, which is why kids were so easily enticed. A number of U.S. states enacted bans in the 1990s, though automated cigarette dispensers remain legal in many parts of the world. Japan may have more than any other nation and has come up with some high-tech—and ridiculous—ways to bar access from underaged smokers, such as optical scans and software for detecting facial wrinkles. Clever teens can apparently game the system by simply making a contorted face.
Ashtrays are another example of the insinuation of cigarettes into everyday life. It is hard to imagine a world without, but ashtrays were not a common part of life until about a century ago. The word we most often use (and spell) did not even exist: until the twentieth century ash-tray was typically spelled as either two separate words or a hyphenated compound, and the OED records the first single-word spelling (with no hyphen) in 1926.
Louis Kyriakoudes, director of the Oral History Project at the University of Southern Mississippi, has shown that cigarette makers spent a great deal of time and effort getting ashtrays into American consumer products. Automakers were cajoled into putting one into every car, and anyone who flew in a commercial plane in the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s will remember ashtrays in the armrests of their seats—later stuffed with trash or gum after the smoking bans of the 1990s. Ashtrays were ubiquitous in offices and restaurants, hospitals and doctors’ offices, trains and taxis, and for a time it was hard to get very far from one without hiking into the woods. Movie theaters and university lecture halls had ashtrays built into the seats, and ashtrays were built into barber chairs. I have seen (Japanese-made) slot machines with built-in ashtrays and “smokeless” ashtrays powered by batteries or USB cables. Bridge tables had clip-on ashtrays, and Kyriakoudes tells how Edward Bernays, the marketing genius for American Tobacco, approached furniture makers in the 1930s to get them to build ashtrays into kitchen cabinets. Designers threw themselves into the art, fashioning ashtrays in the shapes of pianos, shoes, turtles, toilets, tires, and naked ladies. I have seen ashtrays celebrating Walt Disney World, Penn Central Station, the 1980 Olympics, and every state in the Union.
My all-time favorite, though, is the ashtray built into the U.S. military’s SAGE computer, a digital brain behemoth designed in the 1950s to protect U.S. airspace against a Soviet nuclear attack. SAGE—Semi-Automatic Ground Environment—was the world’s most advanced electronic brain, linking hundreds of radar stations in the United States as “the first large-scale computer communications network.” The charming part of this doomsday machine, now on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, is the cigarette lighter and ashtray built into the console, just to the left of the radar screen intended to reveal enemy aircraft or missiles penetrating our airspace. One can imagine these guardians of our national security, stoic in their morbid duties, carefully extinguishing their cigarettes as the world descends into Armageddon . . .
~~Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition -by- Robert N. Proctor
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