Cigarette word is coming from Spanish word “cigarro”. It means smoking rolled tobacco. Tobacco is not addictive but modern cigarettes are including many addictive items in them. According to researches, first tobacco smoking experiments started in 9th century. The Maya and Aztec ancients made it very popular. They were also rolling some psychoactive drugs and smoking them in their unique religious rituals. It’s possible to see temple engravings of Aztexs with tobacco smoking. When French people started to use tobacco rolls in 17th century, they called it “cigarette” and it’s still in the same name. Today there are multinational companies serving cigarette in boxes. How many cigarettes are there in a box?
It’s generally 20 cigarettes in a package. But in some countries and in some local communities, companies are releasing cigarette boxes with various numbers of cigarettes in them.
In Australia, especially country based smoking brands like Longbeach are sometimes producing boxes with over 30 cigarettes. But most common quantity in boxes is 25. Some companies released cigarette boxes with 50 cigarettes in it but it’s very local now. In country, companies must put at least 20 cigarettes in a box.
In the United States of America, companies have to put at least 20 cigarettes in a box. Some export companies and brands put 25 cigarettes in their box but many American people believe that it’s only a commercial trick and quality is low. There were cigarette boxes with 10 cigarettes in the economic crisis years but now it’s very local and people are mostly preferring 20 cigarette ones.
There are nearly same laws on the cigarette boxes in the United Kingdom. It’s 20 cigarettes in a box is the standard but there are still many companies releasing 10 cigarette boxes especially in big cities. Also in country, it’s very common to buy cigarettes from vending machines but they mostly put 16 or 18 cigarettes in a box while the box size is same with retail ones.
In European countries, it was tradition to put 20 cigarettes in a box. But today, taxes on cigarette are very high and companies are preferring to put more and more cigarettes in a box to balance end sale prices.
There are also special cigarette boxes for collectors. It’s possible to find some classic product’s souvenir boxes in the markets. For example, Camel boxes are classics and it’s possible to find Camel Collector’s Pack.
There were no commercial cigarette boxes in the 1700s but in 1800s, some companies started to release commercial products. In the first half of 1800s, it was only possible to buy handmade rolls and they were very expensive with 4 or 5 cigarettes in a box. Biggest facilities producing cigarette were releasing 40 bin handmade rolls maximum in a day. Then in the second half of 1800s, James Albert Bonsack invented the cigarette rolling machine. It increased production from 40.000 to 4 million.
In the first half of 1900s, people were using pipes and some rolls for smoking. They were not inhaling the tobacco and they were only blowing it for smoke. In 30s, today’s modern cigarettes in boxes started to be sold worldwide and companies advertised cigarettes with inhaling. There are some ads of 30s like Lucky Strike’s “Do You Inhale?”
Cigarette sales are forced to stop in Europe in 1940s by anti-tobacco movement in Nazi Germany. But in America, “health effects of tobacco smoking” advertisement campaign is started and it made the cigarette smoking country wide popular. After war, America send a big help to Germany and trucks were full of cigarette boxes.
