Cigarette Filters
Most consumers perceive filtered cigarettes as safer than non-filtered cigarettes. Filters dominated the market by the 1960s and filter cigarettes’ market share climbed from 0.5% in 1950 to more than 98% today. Filter manipulation has been instrumental creating lights and ultra light cigarettes.
First Cigarette Filters
Smoke filter plug for cigarette paper tubes
1928 First Cigarette “plug” Filter
Hungarian inventor Boris Aivaz patents a process for the production of cigarette filters from crepe paper.
1954 Winston.
R.J. Reynolds introduced Winston emphasizing the “pure snow white filter” and “filter blend,” which internal studies revealed had more carcinogens than unfiltered Camels.
1931 Parliament First Paper Filter
1954 Marlboro cigarettes with cork tipped “Selectrite” filter and flip-top box was marketed by Philip Morris.
1952 Viceroy First Cellulose Filter
1955 Brown & Williamson introduces the Tareyton activated charcoal filter, claiming that the activated charcoal “scrubs the smoke clean.”
1952 Kent
Lorillard introduced Kent cigarettes, with its Micronite filter, promising“the greatest health protection in
cigarette history.” The original filter was made with crocidolite asbestos.After 1956 the Kent filter was reformulated without asbestos.
Kent crocidolite asbestos filter
1976 Filtration: More Nicotine and Tar
“In most cases, however, the smoker of a filter cigarette was getting as much or more nicotine and tar as he would have gotten from a regular cigarette. He had abandoned the regular cigarette, however, on the grounds of reduced risk to health.”
Chest X-ray image ,shows a huge isolated mass in the right lung.
Ventilation and Lung Cancer
Since the rise in popularity of “low-tar” and ventilated brands that are particularly easy to inhale, the location of lung cancer has moved outward toward the lung’s periphery. Adenocarcinoma is a common tumor in that location compared to small cell and squamous cell tumors that occur in the center of the lungs.
Barclay “99% Tar Free”
In 1980, Brown and Williamson marketed Barclay cigarette as an ultra-low tar brand using the FTC testing method. But its special ventilated ‘grooved’ filter was designed so that it would collapse during the normal act of smoking.