Short answers, pulled from the story.
Cigarette smoking causes more than 8 million deaths worldwide each year. More than 1.3 million of those deaths are nonsmokers who die from exposure to secondhand smoke. The World Health Organization estimates tobacco caused 100 million deaths over the course of the 20th century.
Juan Nepomuceno Adorno of Mexico received the first patent for a cigarette-making machine in 1847. A second machine developed by James Albert Bonsack in the 1880s was more transformative, increasing daily production from roughly 40,000 hand-rolled cigarettes to around 4 million.
The American Tobacco Company was formed in 1890 when James Buchanan Duke combined his firm with the four other major cigarette companies of the time. Known as the Tobacco Trust, it used aggressive tactics against competitors and by 1910 produced 86% of all cigarettes made in the United States.
Cigarette smoke contains over 4,000 chemical compounds, more than 70 of which are carcinogens. The most genotoxic include acetaldehyde at 1,448 micrograms per cigarette, isoprene at 952 micrograms, and acrolein at 122.4 micrograms. Each damages DNA through distinct mechanisms including strand breaks, crosslinks, and adduct formation.
Australia became the first country to introduce brand-free plain cigarette packaging on the 1st of December 2012, after the High Court dismissed a legal challenge by major tobacco companies in August 2012. All packs must use an olive green color with health warnings covering 90% of the back and 70% of the front.
In 2017, 5.4 trillion cigarettes were produced globally and were smoked by almost 1 billion people. China alone consumed more cigarettes than all other low- and middle-income countries combined, with 2,351 billion cigarettes consumed that year.