Smoking reeds to cigarettes

Smoking in one form or another has records as early as 5000BC and is considered to have originated in the earliest settlements of the Peruvian and Ecuadorian Andes. However it is difficult to be accurate with the starting dates as many ancient settlements across the globe would have been smoking varies forms of herbs and grass long before history was ever recorded.

Cigarettes can be traced back to the 9th Century AD where the Mayans and later The Aztecs used Smoking tubes and rolled up reeds of tobacco. They used it for rituals as well as pleasure.

The brand Muratti which originated in Turkey in 1821 and now owned by Phillip Morris International is considered to be the oldest branded cigarettes still in the market. On average 6 trillion cigarettes are sold across the world per annum which means 18 billion cigarettes are smoked daily. So this makes the tobacco industry one of the largest in the world. May be the largest where minimal or no advertising is used. The oldest customer living is 126 year old Brazilian Jose Aguinelo dos Santos.