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James A. Bonsack was born in eastern Roanoke County, Virginia.His father, Jacob Bonsack, owned a woolen mill where James learned about industrial machinery. In 1878 he was admitted to the Lutheran Roanoke College, but decided to withdraw to work on designing a cigarette rolling machine.
Duke's father, Washington, had owned a tobacco company that his sons James and Benjamin (1855–1929) took over in the 1880s. In 1885, James Buchanan Duke acquired a license to use the first automated cigarette making machine (invented by James Albert Bonsack), and by 1890, Duke supplied 40 percent of the American cigarette market (then known as pre-rolled tobacco).
During the first post-depression 1880 year, 533 million cigarettes were manufactured. [2] Until 1880 when James Albert Bonsack invented the first cigarette rolling machine, all cigarettes were rolled manually, on average about four cigarettes per minute by experienced workers. Pack of Sweet Caporal cigarettes.
In 1882, two years after W. Duke, Sons & Company entered into the cigarette business, James Bonsack invented a cigarette-rolling machine. It produced over 133 cigarettes per minute, the equivalent of what a skilled hand roller could produce in one hour, and reduced the cost of rolling cigarettes by 50%.
In Europe, there was a desire for not only snuff, pipes and cigars, but cigarettes appeared as well. Cigar rolling and even the creation of pipe tobacco at the time was labor-intensive and, without slave labor, innovation needed to occur. [22] Bonsack's cigarette rolling machine, as shown on U.S. patent 238,640.
An early cigarette-rolling machine mass-produced cigarettes at fifty times the speed of a human cigarette roller. Pre-rolled cigarettes, like cigars, were initially expensive, as a skilled cigarette roller could produce only about four cigarettes per minute on average [7] Cigarette-making machines were developed in the 1880s, replacing hand ...
James Bonsack, an avid craftsman, in 1881 created a machine that revolutionized cigarette production. The machine chopped the cured tobacco leaves, then dropped a certain amount of the tobacco into a long tube of paper, which the machine would then roll and push out the end where it would be sliced by the machine into individual cigarettes ...
The first cigarette rolling machine was introduced in 1880 by James Albert Bonsack, while the cigar-making machine first appeared in 1889. [ 16 ] [ 17 ] As prices of cigarettes and cigars fell, cigar-making unions lost thousands of members; an estimated 56,000 jobs were lost between 1921 and 1935. [ 18 ]