The men who began the irresistible and devastating rise of Big Tobacco| Tabaccologia

Abstract

The creators of the modern cigarette were James Albert Bonsack, the inventor of the Bonsack machine in 1880, and the American industrialist James Buchanan Duke, who helped pioneer marketing systems that led to the global success of the cigarette. This success eventually led Duke, at the end of the 1800s, to establish the American Tobacco Company, challenging the British Imperial Tobacco Company, founded and led by Henry H. Wills. The rivalry eventually gave way to an agreement, resulting in the formation of the British-American Tobacco Company, monopolizing the global market. Thus, Big Tobacco was born.

Introduction

Telling the story of the tobacco industry (Big Tobacco) and its success means narrating capitalism in its most cynical and destructive form, which for over a century has sown pain and death. The irresistible and devastating rise of Big Tobacco begins when James Albert Bonsack invents, patents, and commercializes the automatic cigarette-rolling machine, the Bonsack machine. Among those who believed in the future of this automatic machine, which promised a secure business, were the American James Buchanan Duke and the Englishman Henry O. Wills.

James Albert Bonsack

James Albert Bonsack (October 9, 1859 - June 1, 1924) was an American inventor, known for creating the first automatic cigarette rolling and production machine in 1880 (Figure 1). His story was recounted in The Bright-Tobacco Industry by Nannie May Tilley.

The Bonsack machine

Until the late 1870s, cigarettes had to be rolled by hand, and their ends were sealed by twisting. A skilled worker could produce about four cigarettes per minute, or approximately 200 in an hour. Given the ever-increasing demand for pre-packaged cigarettes, the dominant companies in the industry at the time relied on literal armies of workers. For instance, in 1882, Allen & Ginter, the largest producer of the era, employed 450 female workers in its Richmond, Virginia factory to produce cigarettes [1,2].

By 1880, the largest manufacturers, including the aforementioned Allen & Ginter of Richmond, Virginia; William S. Kimball & Company of Rochester, New York; and Kinney Tobacco and Goodwin & Company, both based in New York, controlled 80% of the market. They recognized the need to invest in mechanization and automation to sustain their businesses. In 1875, Allen & Ginter even offered a $75,000 prize for anyone who could develop a functional cigarette-rolling machine.

Amid this climate, the true revolution occurred on September 4, 1880, when James Albert Bonsack filed a patent application for a machine capable of automatic cigarette production. The inspiration for his invention, whose first prototype was lost in a warehouse fire in Lynchburg, Virginia, came to Bonsack while observing machines at his father’s textile mill. The machine essentially created an “infinite” cigarette, wrapping a blend of tobacco in a large, thin paper roll and then cutting it into appropriately sized cigarettes using rotating shears. The ends remained open, requiring the addition of chemical additives such as glycerin, sugar, and molasses to prevent the tobacco from drying out.

Bonsack won the contest, but his initial attempts at automation were not successful. The cigarettes produced were irregular in shape, and the tobacco content was unevenly distributed, resulting in low-quality products that were not well-received by consumers [2].

A critical part of his machine was the forming tube, where the cigarette was shaped into a continuous roll. As is often the case with inventions, an initial construction error ultimately contributed to the machine’s eventual success. After further improvements, Bonsack was granted the patent (No. 238,640) in March 1881 [3]. The final version of the machine could produce 200 cigarettes per minute, or about 120,000 per day, and it halved the production cost per unit (Figure 2) [4,5].

While these numbers may seem modest compared to modern production rates of 8,000 to 14,000 cigarettes per minute, the impact was revolutionary. A historian in 1884 described the Bonsack machine as one of the most complex and remarkable devices of its time. However, he also predicted it would lead to societal hardships by displacing many workers. Despite this, by 1886, James B. Duke’s New York manufacturing plant was using 15 Bonsack machines and employed 750 workers.

Big Tobacco is born

In early 1882, Bonsack, together with his father, brother, and brother-in-law, founded the Bonsack Machine Company. The company offered to lease its machines (including an operator) to cigarette manufacturers, charging a rental fee plus $0.30 per thousand cigarettes sold. The first company to order a machine was Allen & Ginter, the same company that had issued the competition ultimately won by Bonsack. However, in what became one of the greatest mistakes in modern industrial history, Allen & Ginter canceled the order after its executives convinced themselves – contrary to their initial belief – that customers would not accept a product that was not handcrafted [6].

The turning point came when other companies began adopting the Bonsack machine, most notably the American W. Duke & Sons of James Buchanan Duke and the British W.D. & H.O. Wills of Henry O. Wills.

James Buchanan Duke

In 2008, the spectacular Duke Tobacco Gardens near Princeton University were closed and dismantled. These gardens had been created by the famous heiress Doris Duke in honor of her father, James Buchanan Duke (Durham, December 23, 1856 – New York, October 10, 1925). James Buchanan Duke was an American entrepreneur active in the fields of electricity but especially tobacco (Figure 3). He is widely regarded as the architect of Big Tobacco’s dominance, a force responsible for 100 million deaths in the 20^th century. These ‘tobacco gardens’ perhaps plainly illustrate what the philosopher Walter Benjamin once stated: “There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously a document of barbarism” [7,8].

Origin and rise of Big Tobacco

The turning point came when James Buchanan Duke, owner of W. Duke & Sons, a pipe tobacco factory founded in 1865 by his father, Washington Duke, decided to enter the cigarette market and believe in Bonsack’s invention. Contrary to his competitors, Duke took pride in the industrial nature of his product (every package produced bore a label stating it was made with the most modern technologies), claiming that the machines, being more efficient and precise, produced a superior result compared to manual labor.

In 1884, while his competitors were still hesitant and reluctant to abandon traditional production methods, Duke installed two Bonsack machines in his Durham factory. This allowed Bonsack to improve his products, leading to a collaboration that gave Duke substantial discounts on the new machines compared to other producers, who only later turned to automation.

Over time, Duke became the true controller of the Bonsack company, which, thanks to him, became the industry leader, and of its patents. This allowed him to dominate the cigarette market through his new company, the American Tobacco Company [9].

By 1890, Duke had gained control of his four main competitors, merging them into a single entity, the American Tobacco Company, thus creating a monopoly in the American cigarette market.

At the beginning of the 1900s, Duke sought to conquer the British market just as he had in America, forcing the then-divided British producers to unite under the Imperial Tobacco Company of Great Britain and Ireland Ltd (Imperial Tobacco). After two years of intense competition in Britain, Imperial Tobacco entered the U.S. market, forcing American Tobacco to come to an agreement. With the agreement, the two companies divided the markets: the American market remained with American Tobacco, while the British market stayed with Imperial Tobacco. A third company, a joint venture between the two, called the British-American Tobacco Company, would control tobacco trade in the rest of the world.

During this time, Duke was frequently sued by partners and shareholders. In 1906, the American Tobacco Company was found guilty of violating antitrust laws, and as a result, the company’s assets and operations were split into four separate companies: the American Tobacco Company itself, and the pre-existing R. J. Reynolds, Liggett & Myers, and Lorillard [7,10].

Marketing strategy

However, with the introduction of the Bonsack machine, an excess of production and supply was created that needed to be sold; therefore, adequate demand had to be generated. The solution was marketing and advertising of cigarettes. Duke realized that to increase the number of smokers, he could invest in marketing and advertising: he sponsored sporting events, gave away cigarettes at beauty pageants, bought advertising space in leading magazines, and included collectible cards in cigarette packages. In 1889 alone, he spent $800,000 on advertising, roughly equivalent to $25 million today. His success was also aided by a significant competitive advantage: although Bonsack retained the patent for his machine, in a gesture of gratitude, he offered Duke a 30% discount on the lease contract. By 1890, Duke controlled 40% of the American cigarette market, and in the last fifteen years of the 19^th century, the number of smokers in the United States quadrupled.

Meanwhile, his success continued to grow: he managed to expand into new countries (such as China) and new sectors of society, spreading smoking even among women.

At the time, it was not suspected that cigarettes were harmful to health, and the only movements opposing the spread of smoking were based on moral concerns, particularly due to the consumption of cigarettes among women and children. In the 19^th century, the only women who smoked were prostitutes: Duke understood that in order to convince women to smoke, he had to change the social meaning of smoking. He turned to advertisers who transformed cigarettes into a symbol of female emancipation [7].

Although, in principle, cigarettes were associated with women of loose morals (‘Smoking is a great sensual pleasure. While I smoke, I await the man I love...’ sang Sarita Montiel in the 1950s), with a clever advertising campaign, they were transformed into symbols of women’s liberation. By the late 1920s, young women could be seen marching and holding their torches of freedom – their cigarettes.

Duke, who was a regular cigar smoker, also realized that cigarettes could replace other forms of tobacco consumption: they could be smoked in restaurants and lounges where cigars and pipes were prohibited, and their ease of lighting and staying lit made them more suited to modern city life. Cigarettes were also considered healthier than other forms of smoking due to their smaller size, and for a long time, they were recommended for colds, coughs, and tuberculosis (a disease that today the World Health Organization links to smoking). In reality, cigarettes cause far more health problems and greater tobacco dependence than pipes and cigars, as, unlike these, they are typically inhaled [7].

With a good dose of cynicism and shamelessness in tobacco marketing during the golden age of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, during both World Wars, cigarettes were distributed to hundreds of thousands of soldiers as part of their daily rations. In the immediate post-war period, Camel and Lucky Strike cigarette packs had become the most widely used currency in Europe. Through all these advertising maneuvers, Duke and his partners caused, as we have already mentioned, over 100 million deaths worldwide – more than Hitler and Stalin combined [10].

Duke died in 1925, and he was certainly unaware that he had spread “the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization”, as Robert Proctor describes it, “which in the 20^th century killed about 100 million people. Cigarette filters began to be introduced after Duke’s death, based on a Hungarian patent and thanks to the work of the Bunzl industry. Cigarettes were not linked to lung cancer until the 1930s, and the cause-and-effect relationship with the disease was officially recognized only in 1957 in the UK and in 1964 in the United States with the Terry Report [7,11].

Henry Herbert Wills

Henry Herbert “Harry” Wills (Clifton, Bristol, March 20, 1856 – May 11, 1922) was a businessman and philanthropist from Bristol, and a member of the Wills tobacco family, W.D. & H.O. Wills. He was the son of Henry Overton Wills III and Alice Hopkinson. He studied at Clifton and Bristol University College, then apprenticed at the Avonside Engineering Company.

W.D. & H.O. Wills was a British tobacco company founded in Bristol, England. It was the first British company to produce cigarette paper for packaging and the first to produce cigarettes in series, thanks to the Bonsack machine [12]. The company was founded by his father, Henry O. Wills, in 1786 [13], and underwent several name changes before becoming W.D. & H.O. Wills in 1830.

The most important event in the company’s development in the 1880s was the introduction of machine-made cigarettes. While some brands continued to be made by hand, the purchase of several Bonsack machines enabled the company to realize an advancement that, just a decade earlier, had seemed like a dream. No one contributed more to this successful venture than H.H. (Harry) Wills, who joined the family business in 1881 and began applying his mechanical and engineering background.

Harry Wills, by then one of the partners in W.D. & H.O. Wills, believed in the Bonsack machine, despite it being rejected by other companies, and nothing could shake his confidence, even though he faced strong opposition from his senior partners. They feared the machine would never work satisfactorily and lead to the firing of many workers. In the end, Harry Wills overcame the opposition of his colleagues, convincing them that sales would increase so significantly that employment would actually rise. It is said that he was so confident in the success that he would have been willing to leave the company if the purchase of the Bonsack machine wasn’t justified by increased sales. The machine was purchased, subject to a royalty on production, and soon machine-made cigarettes were on the market.

Thanks to his foresight, after installing a wooden Bonsack cigarette machine, Mr. Wills attended the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, where he brought back another Bonsack machine, this time a metal model. It quickly became clear that Mr. Harry Wills was right. The company’s cigarette production rapidly increased, from 6,500,000 in 1884 to 9,400,000 in 1885 and 13,961,000 in 1886.

In 1888, the machine-made Best Bird’s Eye and Gold Flake Honeydew cigarettes were sold at 7 shillings. By November 1888, the company had eleven Bonsack machines; by the end of 1901, it had double that number. By 1904, the machines were producing 600 cigarettes per minute. The Bonsack machines continued to be used until the closure of the Redcliff Street factory in 1929, although Factory No. 1 on East Street had replaced its Bonsack machines with Standards in order to be more competitive.

An exceptional event in the early days of machine-made cigarettes and the company’s history was the introduction of the Wild Woodbines brand in 1888, a winning advertising idea! The very word, with its suggestion of quiet hours spent among country lanes and thick hedges of honeysuckle, became the happiest of inspirations and advertising gimmicks.

It seems that this advertising idea was the brainchild of Henry’s grandson, Frederick Wills, who came up with the idea of selling Woodbines for 5 pennies in paper packets.

It is said that with the business booming thanks to the success of Woodbines, enthusiasm grew so much that employees at all the warehouses worked overtime, packaging 500 cigarettes at a time. During the same period, another 5-penny brand, “Cinderellas,” was introduced and became very popular in the market.

Although little money was spent on advertising for Woodbines, their affordability and quality soon made them famous worldwide. During World War I, their name was literally on the lips of almost every soldier.

The Reverend G. A. Studdert-Kennedy, who provided both spiritual inspiration and material comfort to the men in the trenches, was affectionately known by the troops as “Woodbine Willie.” A small Russian cruiser that helped cover the troops during the Gallipoli landings in 1915 was immediately christened “The Packet of Woodbines” due to its five smokestacks.

By the end of the 19^th century, W.D. & H.O. Wills joined forces with 12 other family-owned tobacco producers, founding the Imperial Tobacco Company (of Great Britain and Ireland) in response to the aggressive market entry of the American Tobacco Company, led by James Buchanan Duke [12]. This initiative by the 13 companies led to the establishment of Imperial Tobacco on December 10, 1901, solidifying it as the dominant producer in the United Kingdom; seven of its directors were members of the Wills family. In 1902, a subsequent truce with American Tobacco led to the creation of the joint British-American Tobacco Company and the division of the global market.

Conclusions

The automation in cigarette manufacturing, thanks to the “Bonsack machine, ”laid the foundations for what would later be defined as “cynical and destructive capitalism”. Two individuals quickly recognized the potential offered by the Bonsack machine: the American J.B. Duke and the British H.H. Wills, who eventually joined forces, founding the British-American Tobacco Company and monopolizing the global tobacco market. Thus, Big Tobacco was born.

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