Electronic cigarettes were a product a long time in the making, with many architects. The concept dates in a serious way to the 1920s; the first patents were issued to American inventor Henry A. Gilbert in the mid-1960s; in the late 1990s, former NASA engineer and microprocessor pioneer Phil Ray experimented with a new, non-smoking technology. Although Ray’s efforts didn’t go anywhere commercially, they did deliver the word “vape” to the lexicon.
The big breakthrough arrived 15 years ago. It was achieved by a Chinese chemist named Hon Lik, whose motivations were a combination of intellectual curiosity and entrepreneurial rewards -- and human welfare. Cigarette smoking had hastened his father’s death. Hon Lik had a heavy tobacco habit himself, and was experimenting with ways to quit.
Essential Reading
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Bottom line: Higher cigarette taxes reduce cigarette use and increase e-cigarette use. A proposed national e-cigarette tax of $1.65 per milliliter of vaping liquid would raise the pr...
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Bottom line: This review examines how e-cigarettes can displace smoking and how government barriers to e-cigarettes impede this substitution to safer alternatives. These barriers mus...
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Bottom Line: In recent years, fewer people believe that e-cigarettes are less harmful than traditional smoking. This study finds that this reduction in accurate harm perceptions was ...
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Bottom line: This study shows that a variety of non-tobacco e-cigarette flavors, especially fruit, are popular among adult regular vapers, particularly among those who have quit smok...
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Bottom Line: E-cigarettes offer a public health opportunity to improve the lives of cigarette smokers who cannot or do not want to stop consuming nicotine by offering them a viable a...
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