What Smoking Once Does to Your Brain

Setting things on fire and inhaling the smoke is kind of a time-honored tradition for humanity.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that our topic today is just the latest entry in a long history of people smoking dried plants.

Smoking tobacco in particular has been around long enough in one form or another that it may as well have been a universal constant.

We can trace tobacco back as far as 6000 BC, and the tobacco trade has been a historically significant force since the 16th century.

In fact, it is so historically significant that a lot of stuff has happened involving cigarettes.

A lot of stuff.

But for e-cigarettes, the technical term for products like Blue, Kanger, or Juul, their history is more tied to the modern day.

Though the first known design for what we'd later come to know as an e-cigarette was introduced back in 1963.

The 60s again.

Groovy.

Known as the Smokeless, this device was invented by one Herbert A. Gilbert.

Gilbert stated that the Smokeless had potential to prevent disease from tobacco use, and even had dietary benefits.

According to the Smithsonian Magazine, he claimed that anyone on a diet could smoke their favorite foods using vapor flavors like mint, rum, or cinnamon.

Health benefits? Flavored vapor juices? Yeah, this is already sounding familiar.

Of course, there was one big difference between Gilbert's Smokeless and the e-cigarettes of today.

The Smokeless didn't have Nick O'Teen.

In the end, the Smokeless never managed to gain attention, and though different products were introduced since then with varying degrees of success, electronic cigarettes wouldn't take the main stage for another 40 years.

Setting things on fire and inhaling the smoke is kind of a time-honored tradition for humanity.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that our topic today is just the latest entry in a long history of people smoking dried plants.

Smoking tobacco in particular has been around long enough in one form or another that it may as well have been a universal constant.

We can trace tobacco back as far as 6000 BC, and the tobacco trade has been a historically significant force since the 16th century.

In fact, it is so historically significant that a lot of stuff has happened involving cigarettes.

A lot of stuff.

But for e-cigarettes, the technical term for products like Blue, Kanger, or Juul, their history is more tied to the modern day.

Though the first known design for what we'd later come to know as an e-cigarette was introduced back in 1963.

The 60s again.

Groovy.

Known as the Smokeless, this device was invented by one Herbert A. Gilbert.

Gilbert stated that the Smokeless had potential to prevent disease from tobacco use, and even had dietary benefits.

According to the Smithsonian Magazine, he claimed that anyone on a diet could smoke their favorite foods using vapor flavors like mint, rum, or cinnamon.

Health benefits? Flavored vapor juices? Yeah, this is already sounding familiar.

Of course, there was one big difference between Gilbert's Smokeless and the e-cigarettes of today.

The Smokeless didn't have Nick O'Teen.

In the end, the Smokeless never managed to gain attention, and though different products were introduced since then with varying degrees of success, electronic cigarettes wouldn't take the main stage for another 40 years.