In a Puff of Smoke:
Tobacco Road: History

1492	A tobacco plant.   Christopher Columbus received tobacco as a gift from the Arawak people of the Bahamas during his famous voyage to the Americas.
1556	European explorers introduced tobacco to France and, quickly thereafter, to the rest of Europe.
1571	Spanish physicians employed tobacco as a medicine.
1584	Sir Francis Drake—the famous explorer—introduces Sir Walter Raleigh—another explorer of reknown—to smoking while in England.
1612	Native Americans harvest tobacco.   The first commercial tobacco crop was grown in America.
1619	African slaves on a New World tobacco farm.   The first African slaves were brought to Jamestown, Virginia, to work the tobacco plantations.
1640	Smoking was banned in New Amsterdam (now New York City). Greenwich Village, then north of the city limits, was known as "the land where tobacco grows."
1661	Slavery was officially legalized in Virginia.
1730	The first tobacco factories—"snuff mills"—opened in Virginia.
1761	John Hill investigated cancer and declared tobacco snuff to be the cause of cancer of the nose. Dr. Percival Pott noted the high incidence of scrotal cancers in chimney sweeps, linking cancer to soot. Sir John Hill     Sir Percival Pott
1776	The American Revolution began and was, in part a “tobacco war.” Along the Chesapeake Bay—then referred to as the "Tobacco Coast"—the British tobacco taxes and what seemed to the growers like a perpetual state of debt to British merchants were major factors in the revolt. Tobacco, however, helped finance the Revolution by serving as collateral for loans from France.
1843	The molecular formula for nicotine—the compound in tobacco that makes it addictive—was determined to be C10H14N2.
1861	During the Civil War, tobacco was issued along with rations of food and drink. Many northerners were first introduced to tobacco in this way. Also, cigarettes begin to become popular. Before this time tobacco was mainly smoked in pipes and cigars.
1864	The first cigarette factory in the United States was opened.
1875	Bizet's opera Carmen, about a female worker in an Spanish cigarette factory, opened.
1889	J. N. Langley and W. L. Dickinson reported on their landmark study of the effect of nicotine on human nerves.
1890's	nicotine   Nicotine was first synthesized chemically by Adolph Pinner at the University of Berlin in Germany. Pinner's molecular structure for nicotine was confirmed in the early 1900s.
1900	Washington, Iowa, Tennessee and North Dakota banned the sale of cigarettes. Then 41 of the 45 states in the Union follow suit. By 1927, however, all state bans on cigarettes were repealed.
1906	Tobacco was removed from the U.S. Pharmacopoeia, thus eliminating it from regulation by the Food and Drug Administration. The move was made to gain the needed support for the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.
1909	Legendary baseball player Honus Wagner ordered the American Tobacco Company to take his picture off its cigarette packs. This made the Honus Wagner baseball card the most valuable of all time.
1910	Per capita cigarette consumption in the United States was 94 cigarettes per year.
1913	The American Society for the Control of Cancer was established. It was later renamed the American Cancer Society.
1917	The U.S. War Department sent massive numbers of cigarettes to World War I soldiers.
1930	Researchers in Germany found a statistical correlation between smoking and cancer.
1940	Per capita cigarette consumption in the United States reached 2,558 per year.
1950	Three major scientific studies linked smoking to cancer.
1964	The first Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health was issued.
1971	Cigarette advertisements were banned on radio and television. Warnings became required on cigarette packs.
1986	The Nineteenth Surgeon General's Report found smokeless tobacco (chewing tobacco and snuff) to be addictive.
1987	The U.S. Congress banned smoking on airline flights of less than two hours.
1992	Wayne McLaren, the world-famous "Marlboro Man" of cigarette advertising fame, died of lung cancer at age 51.
1994	Mississippi became the first state to sue tobacco companies for the costs of health care associated with smoking. Many other states soon followed suit.
1995	The television networks aired an interview with former tobacco executive Jeffrey Wigand in which he claimed that industry leaders lied to Congress about their knowledge of nicotine's addictiveness.
1996	Scientists announced that they found a chemical link between a derivative of benzo(a)pyrene, a substance found in tobacco tar, and the p53 cancer tumor suppressor gene.
1996	States' attorneys general and tobacco industry officials arrived at a settlement to include limits on lawsuits against the industry, to add warnings on cigarette packs, increased spending for antismoking campaigns and restrictions on advertising. The settlement is not supported in Congress.
1998	California became the first state to ban smoking in bars.
1998	Attorneys general of 46 states signed an agreement with the tobacco industry to settle state lawsuits.
1999	The Philip Morris Company admitted that smoking causes cancer.
2000	The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the regulation of tobacco by the Food and Drug Administration.

For more information, at other Web sites...

Tobacco Timeline — a very extensive timeline of tobacco history, created by Gene Borio for Tobacco BBS, Tobacco.org.