The popular stories about the introduction of various forms of using tobacco are always about the military. It is said that the habit of cigarette smoking passed from the Spanish soldiers, who had learned it from Brazilians, to the French in the 1830
The popular stories about the introduction of various forms of using tobacco are always about the military. It is said that the habit of cigarette smoking passed from the Spanish soldiers, who had learned it from Brazilians, to the French in the 1830s. However, there is another story that locates the re-invention of cigarettes in the 1850s wars between Russia and Turkey. A Turkish soldier, whose pipe was destroyed by a bullet, put tobacco in the paper from the envelop of a cartouche, and smoked it. [[Ferland, 2007] And still another claims that it was the French soldiers, arriving with paper and tobacco, who diffused the habit in Russia. These different stories could be sorted out by considering that the Brazilians and Spanish may well have used a corn leaf – which is how cigarettes were described as late as 1864 in G.A. Henrieck’s Du Tabac. There we read that cigarettes are rolled in paper “sans colle”. Indeed, this was the technical difficulty with c