Who Invented Cigarettes?

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, and May Complicate Pregnancy.

No one person invented the cigarette. Paper-wrapped tobacco was being smoked in Central America a thousand years ago and in Spain by the 1700s. What can be traced to individuals is the modern, machine-made, mass-marketed cigarette, and that comes down to four names: a Mexican inventor who patented the first rolling machine, a Virginia teenager who built the one that worked, a North Carolina businessman who used it to create the modern tobacco industry, and the company that made the first nationally branded blend. Here is who did what, and when.

Last verified September 11, 2026. For the full timeline, see When Were Cigarettes Invented?

Before anyone “invented” it

Reed tubes and paper-wrapped tobacco appear in Mesoamerican records from around the ninth century. Spanish workers in Seville, where the royal tobacco factory processed New World leaf, rolled the sweepings in scraps of paper; the resulting papelate is documented in Goya’s paintings of the 1770s and 1780s. French soldiers picked the habit up during the Peninsular War, the French gave it the name cigarette (little cigar) by about 1830, and the French state tobacco monopoly began manufacturing them in 1845. A popular story credits Egyptian or Turkish soldiers at the 1832 siege of Acre with rolling tobacco in paper cartridge tubes after their pipe was damaged; it is repeated widely and has no reliable source, so treat it as a legend.

Juan Nepomuceno Adorno, 1847

The first patent for a cigarette-making machine belongs to Juan Nepomuceno Adorno, a Mexican inventor, in 1847. The same year, a tobacconist named Philip Morris opened a shop on Bond Street in London selling hand-rolled cigarettes, which is where that company’s history begins. Neither event changed much at the time: cigarettes remained a hand-rolled, minority product next to pipes, cigars and chewing tobacco for another three decades.

James Albert Bonsack, 1880 to 1881

The machine that mattered was built by James Albert Bonsack, an 18-year-old from Roanoke County, Virginia, in response to a $75,000 prize offered by the Allen & Ginter company of Richmond for a practical cigarette-rolling machine. Bonsack’s prototype was finished in 1880, was destroyed in a warehouse fire in Lynchburg before it could be demonstrated, and was rebuilt. He filed his patent application on September 4, 1880, and US Patent No. 238,640 was granted on March 8, 1881, with a second patent following in October. The machine fed a continuous rod of tobacco into a paper tube, sealed it and cut it to length, producing about 200 cigarettes a minute, or 120,000 in a ten-hour shift. A skilled hand roller managed about four a minute. Allen & Ginter, worried the machine would put its workforce out of a job and that machine-made cigarettes would not sell, declined to adopt it.

James Buchanan Duke, 1884 to 1890

The businessman who did adopt it was James Buchanan “Buck” Duke of W. Duke, Sons & Co. in Durham, North Carolina. In 1884 Duke leased two Bonsack machines and negotiated a secret royalty of 20 cents per thousand cigarettes rather than the 30 cents charged to competitors, in exchange for using the machines exclusively. With production costs cut by more than half, Duke spent the difference on advertising, coupons, trading cards and price cuts. By 1889 W. Duke, Sons & Co. was the largest cigarette maker in the United States, and in 1890 Duke merged it with his four largest rivals to form the American Tobacco Company, which controlled most of the country’s cigarette production until the Supreme Court broke it up under the Sherman Act in 1911. The pieces of that breakup became Liggett & Myers, Lorillard, R.J. Reynolds and a smaller American Tobacco, the companies that made every major cigarette brand of the twentieth century.

R.J. Reynolds and Camel, 1913

The modern cigarette as a branded product dates to 1913, when R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company of Winston-Salem introduced Camel, a packaged cigarette blending domestic flue-cured and burley tobaccos with a proportion of Turkish leaf. Reynolds backed it with the first national cigarette advertising campaign, sold it at a single price nationwide, and within a decade Camel was the largest-selling cigarette in the country. Rationing of cigarettes to soldiers in the First World War completed the shift: by the 1920s the cigarette had displaced every other form of tobacco as the way Americans consumed it.

What came after

The rest of the story is regulation rather than invention: the Surgeon General’s report of January 11, 1964, package warnings from 1966, the broadcast advertising ban of 1971, the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement, FDA authority over tobacco in 2009 and the federal minimum age of 21 in 2019. US adult cigarette smoking peaked at 42.4% in 1965 and stood at 9.1% in 2025 according to the National Health Interview Survey. The people above built the product; the last sixty years have been spent unbuilding the market for it.

Sources

• National Library of Medicine, The Reports of the Surgeon General: Smoking and Health
• US Code, 15 U.S.C. 1331 and 1335
• NCHS FastStats, Smoking
• Wikipedia, James Albert Bonsack, Cigarette, Camel (secondary, with cited primary references)