Ashes to Ashes (31 page)

For a product as simple as a cigarette, no more than a short stick of cured, shredded, flavored, and paper-wrapped leaf, devising a true filter to reduce intake of its combustible by-product was a surprising technological challenge. Cigarette tobacco, burning in the range of 700 to 900 degrees Fahrenheit, produced hundreds of volatile compounds in a smoky aerosol composed of millions of microscopic particles of incompletely burned organic matter ejected into a gas stream by the burning cone and condensing as they cooled to room temperature in the two-tenths of a second required to travel from the ember to the smoker’s mouth. In the process many physical and chemical changes occurred, so that the inhaled smoke was quite different molecularly from the cured tobacco of the unlit cigarette. How and what to filter from this immensely complex mixture? Possibly the toxic gases within it could be absorbed chemically by the filter, but such a technique would have to await precise analysis of the volatile gases by equipment just then becoming available. The only practical form of filtration available at Lorillard was the primitive one of mechanical intervention. And since a sievelike narrowing of the smoke’s passageways would cause it to clog up at the openings and greatly increase resistance, thereby requiring the smoker to draw in with far more force, the most practical form of filtration would be fibrous in nature—that is, a
weblike arrangement dependent upon the chance collision of smoke particles held to the fibrous filaments by the adhesive forces of nature. The choices of material that would best lend itself to this end were greatly limited by the requirements that the substance be nontoxic, tasteless, pliable, adaptable to swift fabrication, and, above all, cheap.

While filters had been made of materials ranging from permeable leaves to porous crepe paper dating as far back as Montezuma’s time, the first modern, reasonably effective American cigarette filter in noticeable commercial use was the one on the premium Parliament, introduced in 1931. It was made from spun-cotton fiber soaked in a solution of caustic soda that made it swell and grow shiny with tension; in the washing and drying process, the fibers crisscrossed to form a highly absorbent web suitable for trapping minute particles in smoke. But the cotton filter material had to be carefully inserted in a little wad by hand; faster, cheaper, and infinitely more malleable was the cellulose acetate filter, a form of which was first used in the 1936 Viceroy. Cellulose, a proteinlike vegetable material that lends structure to whatever it is mixed with, was found to be highly manipulable when blended with the acidic solvent acetate, run through a sieve, and extruded spaghetti-fashion in a wide, soft ribbon called a “tow,” the form in which it was sent to the cigarette manufacturer. The latter fluffed it, shaped it, twisted the filaments—infinite variations of crimping were possible—and then recondensed it, coated it with a plasticizer to harden it, and sliced it into little plugs joined to the tobacco by a paper overwrap. The cellulose filter was one reason Viceroy could be offered to smokers at a premium of only one or two cents more than the regular unfiltered brands while the Parliament cost nearly 50 percent more.

But settling upon some form of cellulose acetate, which could also be supplemented with other substances to heighten its blockage efficiency, was only part of the puzzle. The efficacy of the cellulose could vary depending on the degree of fineness or coarseness of the fibers, on whether they were packed densely or loosely, on how much and in what shape they were twisted, on what pattern they were arranged in—whether parallel, at right angles, or randomly—and on the length and circumference of the filter. All of these factors could affect how much smoke actually penetrated the filter. As it would evolve, the typical cellulose acetate cigarette filter of about 20 millimeters in length would, at any given cross section, present an amazingly large total surface area, calculated to be on average about 27,000 millimeters, or enough to collect slightly more than half of the hundreds of millions of passing microscopic particles in a typical 500-milligram cigarette.
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As Parmele was pondering his design options, he became aware of a filter material said to be uniquely efficient and just declassified as a wartime secret
by the U.S. military. Used in gas masks and at atomic fuel plants to prevent the escape of radioactivp dust, the material was called crocidolite or “African blue,” a form of asbestos, the rocklike mineral highly resistant to heat and corrosion, which when crushed into fine fibers could be easily woven and matted for use in automobile brake linings and clutch pads, roofing, flooring, plumbing, and electrical insulation. That free-floating filaments of the stuff might, if inhaled, prove gravely harmful to human tissue was not common knowledge outside the asbestos industry itself. Crocidolite was a remarkable form of asbestos in that its fibers were so thin that they could be arranged to trap particles as small as one micron, or 1/25,000 of an inch. The man most responsible for finding military uses for the asbestos material was summoned to Lorillard’s New York offices and demonstrated how smoke pumped into a pair of glass vessels was so effectively barred entry to the one with the crocidolite filter that the water in it displayed not a trace of brownish discoloration.

No more than 30 percent of the new Lorillard cigarette filter was fabricated from the asbestos, lest the device should prove impenetrable; the balance was a blend of crimped paper and cotton acetate, and the whole gadget was dubbed the “Micronite” filter, after the microscopic unit of measurement the asbestos was capable of blocking. Since surveys disclosed that women were the most health-conscious smokers and thus the most promising customers for the new filter tip, the brand was given a clean white package with faint horizontal striations so that it would appear a bit less antiseptic; a stronger color hinted at a stronger, possibly more hazardous smoke. Named for Lorillard’s retiring president, Herbert A. Kent, the new product was marketed in March of 1952 as a major scientific accomplishment and priced accordingly at eight or nine cents a pack above the price of regular brands.

Introduced at the very time the Federal Trade Commission was cracking down on the older brands for false claims of mildness and nonirritability, the Kent was positioned by Lorillard as, in effect, the first authentically safeguarded cigarette on the market and its Micronite filter proclaimed “The Greatest Health Protection in Cigarette History.” In truth, the Kent filter permitted only about half as much tar and nicotine to reach the smoker’s mouth as any other brand, and because, after testing it, research director Parmele had assumed the asbestos to be so tightly bound into the filter that it could not escape from the smoke, the first Kent ads stated that the Micronite was made of “a pure, dust-free, completely harmless material,” so safe it was used to filter air in hospitals.

Lorillard lost no time in trying to drive home the new brand’s big alleged advantage, even if that meant tarring all competitors by inference. It was said that “rigorous scientific studies … put Kent in a class by itself where health protection is concerned” and that “The Difference in Protection Is Priceless.” Two problems, though, prevented the new brand from becoming an instant hit.
First, if a smoker was so concerned about the possible harm he was doing to his health, the safest course was plainly not to smoke at all—and for the first time in memory, smokers began to cut back or quit or started to think hard about the practice and what it might be doing to them. Thus, Lorillard’s flush competitors at the top of the industry found the Kent, and especially the way in which it was advertised, most unwelcome. Second and of more immediate concern, many who tried the new Kent found it very hard to draw upon, and when they did, were rewarded by an almost flavorless smoke. The miraculous Micronite might be doing its job too well. The brand sold fewer than 100,000 packs a day in its first year.

But long-standing habits are not reversed overnight. Kent had made its point, and the public’s attention was further captured at the end of 1952 when the nation’s largest-circulation magazine,
Reader’s Digest
, which at the time accepted no advertising whatever and was thus immune from pressure by the free-spending tobacco industry to go easy on its products, ran a two-page article entitled “Cancer by the Carton.” Although it offered no fresh findings, the article induced chills by charging the cigarette industry with covering up the real peril of smoking through all its advertising claims of mildness and references to such relatively benign side effects of the habit as throat irritation and “cigarette hangover”. The far graver worry was lung cancer, a disease never mentioned or alluded to in the cigarette ads. The
Digest
had taken the unmentionable subject out of the medical journals and laid it bare for the masses.

IV

KENT’S
arrival and the interest it had sparked pushed the two established filter-tip brands to more blatant claims of prophylactic value.

Viceroy, the leader, sought to double its appeal as the most healthful cigarette available by offering itself in a king-size as well as regular-length model in 1953, the year that American Tobacco’s long, unfiltered Pall Mall claimed 10 percent of the market and surpassed the Philip Morris brand as the fourth best-selling product in the industry. There was not a shred of serious evidence that the king-length cigarette might be less hazardous than the standard 70-millimeter—only the dubious claim that tobacco was its own best filter—yet the perception was fed, and besides, women liked the longer, more slender shape of the king. Viceroy’s ads, while smaller than its rivals’, now proclaimed a “double-filtering action” of longer length, illustrated with a blowup drawing of the unwrapped device featuring “20,000 tiny filter traps” so that tars and nicotine “cannot reach your throat and lungs.” For the first time, a
major cigarette maker implicitly conceded that the lung was an organ that smoking might damage.

Conservative Benson & Hedges, while far from a major player in the business, tried to cash in on the emerging health appeal in pitching its Parliament. With unabashed overstatement, Parliament, it was now asserted, “filters 100 percent of the smoke—recessed filter keeps trapped tars and nicotine from touching lips and mouth.” The implication that all the smoke was thus rendered harmless distorted the truth. The brand, moreover, was said to have been “ [c]ertified superior and attained consistent filtering efficiency at the laboratory of the U.S. Testing Company,” which sounded like a governmental agency. But when tested in independent labs, Parliament fell far short of all these claims.

It was Kent, though, in its second year and frantically trying to carve a place for itself in the increasingly clamorous marketplace, that set the pace for stridency. “Here’s How Science Solved Your Problem of Sensitivity to Nicotine and Tars,” proclaimed a typical double-page Kent ad in
Life
magazine in May of 1953, the implication clearly being that the product had thus been rendered harmless. Kent’s Micronite filter, it was said, removed “seven times more nicotine and tar”—more than what, it did not state. More pointed still, the brand’s ads asked in their headline, “Do you like a good smoke but not what smoking does to you?” and spoke consolingly of the one in three smokers who happened to be sensitive to tars and nicotine and “[a]s a result, he is usually left with a persistent cough, a nervous feeling, or frequent headaches”—not to mention cancer of the lung, the possibility of which was indeed not mentioned.

However wildly its benefits were exaggerated, Kent’s filter was found to be more effective than its competitors in test results published in
Consumer Reports
early in 1953. With a yield of 7 mg. of tar and 1 mg. of nicotine, Kent generated less than half as much of these now strongly suspect substances per cigarette as Viceroy, with its yield of 14 mg. of tar and 2.4 mg. of nicotine, and Parliament with 12 mg. and 2.7. The yield of king-length Pall Mall at 15 mg. and 2.6 was similar to that of its regular-length stablemate, Lucky Strike, at 16 mg. and 2.1, rendering the alleged Pall Mall advantage illusory. Reynolds’s regular Camel, at 15 mg. of tar and 1.9 mg. of nicotine, was found to yield less than the Viceroy and Parliament filters, while the Chesterfield king version was higher than the regular Chesterfield. Most of the ad claims, in short, were bunk.

If the smaller players in the industry were trying to outdo one another with poorly founded health claims and thereby improve their market shares, the smallest of the three leaders—Liggett & Myers—was apparently a bit more ambivalent about the wisdom of making implicit health claims for its expanded line. Normally tight-lipped Benjamin Few, the tall, slender South Carolinian
who had worked his way up on the manufacturing side to head L&M, remarked that the arrival of the king cigarette was “the worst thing that has happened to this industry,” because the long smokes would inevitably cannibalize their shorter versions and reduce profit margins. Yet he had no choice, Few added, because “if Chesterfield consumption is to be drained off by king-size and filter-tip cigarettes, let it be by our own brands.”

Accordingly, Liggett undertook a remarkably retrogressive series of campaigns that seemed a collective warranty of product safety for all its brands. “Play Safe, Smoke Chesterfield,” ran the banner for the staple brand in the Liggett product line, as buyers were told of a six-month study of smokers consuming between ten and forty cigarettes daily and undergoing thorough examinations before and after the test period of their nose, throat, “and all accessory organs;” the results were that “all participating subjects” were found to be “not adversely affected.” So pleased was the company with this test that its leading radio shill, Arthur Godfrey, in his inimitable chummy manner, reassured listeners of the safety of Chesterfields by citing the study results and commenting to listeners of his “Arthur Godfrey and His Friends” broadcast of, for example, September 24, 1952:

Now that [the six-month test results] ought to make you feel better if you’ve had any worries at all about it. I never did. I smoked two or three packs of these things every day—I feel pretty good. I don’t know. I never did believe they did you any harm and we—we’ve got the proof.