A revolutionary innovation arrived one day from the East. In 1832, the Muslim soldiers of Ibrahim Pasha who were busy laying siege to Acre took to stuffing a little tobacco into the paper cylinders they kept their gunpowder in and then lighting them. They thus invented the cigarette which the Crimean War veterans brought back to Italy in 1857. The fashion of cigarettes rapidly spread all over Europe, thereby creating an unexpected demand for cigarettes, or their English imitations.
