History of e-cigarettes

A fact you may not have expected: Although someone made a prototype of an electronic cigarette a long time ago, the electronic cigarette in the modern sense that we see now was not invented until 2004. Not only that, this seemingly foreign product is actually "export to domestic sales".
American Herbert A. Gilbert patented a "smokeless, non-tobacco cigarette" in 1963, which heats liquid nicotine to produce vapor, mimicking the feeling of smoking. In 1967, several companies tried to produce the electronic cigarette, but because the harm of paper cigarettes had not been taken seriously by society at that time, the project was not really commercialized.
In 2000, Dr. Han Li in Beijing, China, proposed diluting nicotine with propylene glycol and atomizing the liquid with an ultrasound device to produce a water mist effect (actually heating to produce atomized gas). Users can use this to suck nicotine-containing water mist into the lungs and deliver nicotine to the blood vessels. The liquid nicotine diluent is stored in a device called a cigarette cartridge for easy carrying, which is the prototype of modern e-cigarettes.
In 2004, Han Li obtained an invention patent for this product, which began to be officially commercialized the next year and sold by China Ruyan Company. With the popularization of anti-smoking campaigns abroad, e-cigarettes have also flowed into European and American countries from China; In recent years, major cities in China have begun to implement strict smoking bans, and e-cigarettes have slowly begun to become popular in China.