Ashes to Ashes by Richard Kluger Read Free Book Online Page B

pace. In this faster-moving world of electric lighting, transportation, and communication, as the midday dinner gave way to the quick lunch away from home and the horse moved over for the automobile, old ways of smoking lost favor. Chewing tobacco was no longer merely messy but socially disagreeable in more crowded urban America, and its inevitable by-product, spitting, was now identified as a spreader of tuberculosis and other contagions and thus an official health menace. The leisurely pipe all at once seemed a remnant of a slower-tempo age, and cigar fumes were newly offensive amid thronged city life. The cigarette, by contrast, could be quickly consumed and easily snuffed out on the job as well as to and from work.
    This watershed period marked the beginning of the consumer age of trade-marked, mass-produced, and nationally distributed products. From about 1880, Americans of all social classes began to eat, drink, chew, smoke, dress, and clean themselves and outfit their homes with factory-made goods available at moderate prices because they were identically produced in a continuous process that used plentiful low-wage labor. Flowing from this mechanized cornucopia were soups, soaps, cereals, toothpaste, safety razors, cameras, canned comestibles of all sorts, chewing gum, and the cigarette. To spur a demand for these new products based on something other than the lowest possible price, merchandisers created attractive packaging and alluring advertisements. The settling of a continental nation was bringing an unprecedented prosperity to the common man, and with it dollars for goods beyond necessities. The cigarette, though, had proven highly resistant to mass production for this beckoning marketplace.
    As of 1876, the cost-per-thousand for the standard factory hand-rolled cigarette was ninety-six cents, of which all but ten cents went to pay the rollers. Allen & Ginter was employing hundreds of girls as rollers; no matter how comely and moral, they presented a chronic supervisory problem and a highly variable quality of labor. The softness of the materials that went into a cigarette greatly complicated the development of a machine efficient enough to replace human hands. The filler was often too loosely packed and the final product too irregularly shaped; the continuous roll of the paper wrap also was subject to tearing at the slightest irregularity in the applied tension. And with stray tobacco bits flying about and so many moving parts for them to lodge in, the contraption broke down regularly.
    To overcome these obstacles, Allen & Ginter offered the then enormous prize money of $75,000. A teenage tinkerer named James Albert Bonsack, son of a plantation owner near Lynchburg, had been working on the problem for years, and in 1880, when he was twenty-one, finally obtained a patent. The Bonsack machine had an improved feeding mechanism, forming tube, and cuttingknives that allowed it, at peak efficiency, to turn out between 200 and 212 cigarettes a minute, the equivalent of what forty to fifty workers could produce among them. The one-ton behemoth rarely reached its top-rated output, usually managing 70,000 units each ten-hour day.
    Still, Bonsack’s machine promised major savings in the cost of production, and Allen & Ginter ordered a model installed on its premises on an experimental basis. Contemporary reports suggest that there was more involved than its operating efficiency in the company’s final rejection of the Bonsack machine. There was the prize money, of course, but along with other tobacco companies that had considered the Bonsack, Ginter’s firm feared high buyer resistance to a machine-made version of a product that had traditionally been thought of as handcrafted; perhaps the taste of the machinery would be perceived as somehow clinging to the tobacco. Then, too, there was the fear that the machine would prove too efficient, leaving the company with mountains of cigarettes that exceeded the demand. And