What Was The First Vaping Product And Was It Successful?
The modern history of vaping and disposable vapes began in 2003 with the development of the heated vaporiser, which in turn became the e-cigarette as we know it today.
The development of the first modern vape by Dr Hon Lik, inspired in no small part by a nicotine patch nightmare, has since become extremely popular, superseding tobacco smoking and being a major part of many efforts from longtime smokers to finally quit.
However, whilst the initial Ruyan became the template that many vapes followed afterwards from huge multi-part box mods to easy-to-use disposable brands, it was not the first product that tried to replace smoking and it did not coin the term ‘vaping’.
Both were attempted two decades earlier using a very different method, and the events that followed became controversial for decades afterwards.
In Favor
Before he created and attempted to popularise vaping, Phil Ray was one of the most important people in the early history of computing.
Initially a NASA engineer, Phil Ray and Gus Roche founded Computer Terminal Corporation, which aimed to replace the heavy and cumbersome mainframe computers that were increasingly ubiquitous in business with something more versatile and affordable.
Their effort, the Datapoint 2200, is credited with being the first-ever personal computer and was so influential that its central instruction set is still used in desktop and laptop computers to this very day.
However, in the late 1970s, Mr Ray wanted to create a smoke-free cigarette that would provide the sensation of smoking and the intake of nicotine but without the potential harm that inevitably came from tobacco smoke.
Working with his doctor, Norman Jacobson, Mr Ray developed the idea of replacing tobacco with pure nicotine, since it was safer to inhale nicotine than all of the carcinogens that come from tobacco smoke, particularly in highly processed additive-laden cigarettes.
A lot of research was done in this field, and it was found that by soaking a piece of paper in nicotine, you could get the same effect as smoking, but without the smoke and without any of the carcinogens known at the time to be in tobacco smoke.
The result of this development was Favor, a “smoke-free cigarette” that consisted of a plastic tube with a nicotine-soaked filter. Unlike a modern vape, it had no heating element nor electrical parts; a smoker just inhaled pure nicotine through the filter.
The project seemed to have enough potential to commercialise and Advanced Tobacco Products was formed. Mr Ray’s wife, Brenda Coffee, coined the term vaping as an alternative term since smoking a smoke-free cigarette made little sense.
It was released in the early 1980s in a few markets in the Western United States, particularly around California and nearby states, and an early marketing campaign appeared to be effective in several test locations.
What happened next is the subject of some debate.
Out Of Favour
In an interview long after the success of Dr Hon Lik’s vape, Dr Jacobson claimed that outside of some potential cash burn rate issues, Favor seemed to have the makings of a success and several supermarkets were keen to stock it on a trial basis.
However, ascertaining why this is the case can be difficult as there are multiple reasons cited at the same time, and no reason why they could not all be true.
The most definitive reason was that in 1985, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ruled that it believed that Favour was a drug, and because it had not been tested and approved as one under FDA guidelines, it was illegal to sell.
Favor did not contest the rulings of the FDA and promptly shut down all distribution, eventually selling the concept to a Norwegian company that used some of the technology to make a nicotine spray.
However, Dr Jacobson has a different view of what happened; rather than the FDA, he claims that the product was, in his own words, “defective”.
The problem that Advanced Tobacco Products ran into was that their product relied on liquid nicotine, which was very volatile and was prone to evaporating. This is not a problem with modern e-liquids, which use nicotine typically mixed with propylene glycol as a solvent.
When it did, it became cotinine, a metabolite that is harmless but tastes quite bitter and unpleasant, making it far from an ideal alternative to smoking.
One solution was to distribute it as a refrigerated product, but the problem then is that it lacks the convenience of a packet of cigarettes. According to Dr Jacobson, that was when the decision was made to sell the technology instead.
It is possibly a combination of both; the problems with production made it less of an easy sell without modification, and when the FDA’s letter came to them, it was an ideal reason to get out of the market.