Vaping is roughly 20 years old as a commercial product. The first modern e-cigarette went on sale in China in 2004, reached the United States in 2006, and has gone through several distinct generations of technology since then. But the concept itself dates back even further, to a patent filed in 1963.
The 1960s Prototype That Never Took Off
The earliest known vaping device was patented by Herbert A. Gilbert, who filed for a “Smokeless Non-Tobacco Cigarette” with the U.S. Patent Office on April 17, 1963. The patent was granted in August 1965. Gilbert’s design worked by drawing air through a cartridge soaked in flavoring material, then past a heated element, and finally through a mouthpiece into the user’s mouth and lungs. It was a surprisingly modern concept for the era, but the device never made it to market. It would take four decades before anyone successfully commercialized the idea.
The Modern E-Cigarette: 2003
The vaping industry as it exists today traces directly to Hon Lik, a Chinese pharmacist whose father died of lung cancer from heavy smoking. Motivated to quit his own nicotine habit, Hon created what he called “a flameless electronic atomizing cigarette” around 2003 to 2004. His first prototype used a piezoelectric ultrasound element to vaporize a nicotine solution. It was bulky, and the vapor particles it produced were too large to deliver nicotine effectively. The design would be refined, but the core idea stuck: heat a liquid containing nicotine into an inhalable aerosol.
By 2004, the first commercial e-cigarettes were selling in Chinese markets under the brand name Ruyan. In April 2006, the devices reached Europe. By August of that year, they were available in the United States.
Four Generations of Hardware
Vaping devices have evolved through four distinct phases, each changing the experience significantly.
The first generation (2004 to roughly 2009) consisted of “cigalikes,” small devices designed to look and feel like a traditional cigarette. They had limited battery life and produced relatively little vapor.
Around 2009 to 2010, second-generation “vape pens” appeared. These were larger, with refillable tanks, bigger batteries, and more powerful heating elements. They looked less like cigarettes and more like pens or small tubes, and they could produce noticeably more vapor.
Third-generation devices, known as “mods,” pushed further in that direction. They paired tank systems with even larger batteries, giving users the ability to customize their nicotine delivery, adjust wattage, and produce dense clouds of vapor. Mods attracted a hobbyist subculture and dominated the vaping scene for several years.
The fourth generation arrived around 2015 with pod-style devices. The most famous was JUUL. These were compact, sleek, and used a new type of nicotine formulation that changed the trajectory of the entire industry.
Nicotine Salts Changed Everything
One of the biggest technical leaps in vaping history happened between 2013 and 2015, when the founders of what would become JUUL developed and patented the use of nicotine salts. Earlier e-cigarettes used freebase nicotine, which delivered a harsher throat hit at high concentrations and didn’t replicate the sensation of smoking a cigarette very well. Many smokers who tried those early devices found them unsatisfying and went back to cigarettes.
Nicotine salts solved that problem. They allowed devices to deliver higher concentrations of nicotine with a smoother inhale, closely mimicking the rapid nicotine absorption of a traditional cigarette. This made pod systems far more appealing to smokers looking for an alternative, but it also made them more addictive for new users, particularly young people.
The Disposable Takeover
The most recent shift in vaping’s evolution has been the explosive rise of disposable devices. In February 2020, the FDA began cracking down on flavored prefilled cartridges (the kind used in pod systems like JUUL), but that enforcement did not apply to single-use disposable e-cigarettes. The market responded almost immediately.
Between February 2020 and September 2025, sales of disposable devices jumped from 4 million units to 10.2 million, a 154% increase. Their share of the e-cigarette market grew from 26% to nearly 57%. In dollar terms, disposable sales surged from $34.5 million to $183.7 million, a 433% increase. Prefilled cartridge sales dropped by about 31% over the same period. Disposables, which are available in virtually any flavor, are now the most purchased e-cigarette product on the market.
Regulation Caught Up Slowly
For the first decade of commercial vaping, e-cigarettes existed in a regulatory gray area in the United States. The FDA did not formally classify them as tobacco products until August 8, 2016, when its “Deeming Rule” took effect. That rule brought e-cigarettes, along with cigars and other previously unregulated tobacco products, under the agency’s authority for the first time. Before that date, there were essentially no federal rules governing what went into e-liquid, how devices were manufactured, or how they could be marketed.
Who Vapes Today
As of 2024, 7% of U.S. adults use e-cigarettes, according to the National Health Interview Survey. Usage skews heavily by age. Among adults 18 to 24, the rate is 14.8%. For those 25 to 44, it’s 11.1%. It drops to 4.1% for adults 45 to 64 and falls to just 1% among people 65 and older. For context, 9.9% of adults still smoke traditional cigarettes, meaning vaping hasn’t yet overtaken smoking overall but is already more common than cigarettes in the youngest adult age group.
In just over two decades, vaping has gone from a single inventor’s prototype in a Chinese lab to a multibillion-dollar global industry, reshaping nicotine use patterns across an entire generation.