How Did A Nicotine Nightmare Inspire The Creation Of Vapes?
The beauty of invention and innovation is that the source of its inspiration can come from almost anywhere.
Whilst necessity is the mother of invention, the seed of the idea which lets an invention bloom can come from a wealth of different places.
One of the best examples of this is in the world of vape kits. Whilst there has been a desire for a way to smoke without the dangers of smoking for at least half a century, the origin of one of the most popular ways to quit comes from a nightmare fuelled by a steady drip of nicotine.
The Chinese Cigarette Problem
Whilst a lot of countries have huge smoking cultures and smoking problems, the People’s Republic of China might potentially have the worst of them all.
As the world’s largest producer and consumer of tobacco products, China has nearly a third of the world’s number of smokers, which includes half of all adult men.
Smoking is endemic in Chinese society despite smoking bans by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and high-quality cigarettes are to this day still seen as a fairly universal gift that shows respect and camaraderie despite it technically being illegal and ultimately harmful.
Artists, businessmen and especially doctors have deep smoking cultures, ones that are often started as teenagers wanting to be mature, and this is the issue Dr Hon Lik faced.
He was a lifelong smoker, having started at 18 after seeing his father do the same, but once he saw his dad die of lung cancer, he started to look for a way to quit, heartbroken by the unnecessary premature death of someone who shaped him.
His struggles to actually do so would ultimately change the world.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the only real products that could help someone to quit smoking were nicotine replacement therapies. Specifically, nicotine gum and nicotine patches were the most commonly used ways to avoid the effects of withdrawals.
However, whilst nicotine patches work over time for many smokers, for heavy smokers such as Dr Lik, they were not strong enough when he was dealing with his cravings to help him truly stop smoking, given that he had no control over when he would feel the nicotine hit.
As well as this, the different delivery system in a culture where there is a social etiquette for lighting another man’s cigarette was also not helping Dr Lik’s willpower.
The turning point for Dr Lik was one particularly awful night of restless sleep. He suffered from extraordinarily potent nightmares which he believed were caused by a nicotine patch he had forgotten to remove at night.
For him, this was the last straw, and he needed to look for a better solution, one that would actually help him quit properly without the strange cultural and physiological side effects.
Nicotine gum was the only quick-release nicotine therapy at that point, and it was similarly not always the best solution, but it did make him come to the same conclusion the American team at Favor had two decades prior.
Besides being extremely addictive, nicotine does not itself cause a lot of harmful effects. What makes cigarettes harmful is not the part that makes it addictive but all of the chemicals and impurities found in tobacco smoke.
Favor tried to fix this by having a “smokeless cigarette” that allowed people to inhale nicotine from a soaked piece of filter paper. The principle worked but there were flaws in the manufacturing process and an unfortunate legislative issue basically ended the first vape before it began.
Dr Lik’s solution was to try and cover every possible base when it came to replicating the sensation of smoking. This included the heat, the vaping cloud to replace the smoke, the cigar-shaped design of the original Ruyan e-cigarettes and the hit of nicotine.
By 2002, this would lead to a patent, which the following year would lead to a product in China, and by the end of the 2000s it had spread across the world, although it would take until the 2010s for it to have the huge effect on smoking rates that we have seen in recent years.
Arguably the ultimate tragedy of the e-cigarette is that it has helped improve and extend countless lives but not Dr Lik’s himself. He continues to both smoke and vape, although he claims the former is to ensure that the taste and mouthfeel are replicated in the latter.
However, whilst years of research were needed to get to that point, the starting point can be found in a nightmare caused by an errant nicotine patch.