What does the filter on a cigarette do?
Before the 1950s, there was no such thing as a filter-tipped cigarette — or at least nobody smoked it. People smoked unfiltered cigarettes. At that time, there was a growing perception that cigarettes might be harmful, but there was no proof. Cigarette companies spent a lot of advertising money trying to convince everyone that cigarettes were okay. That all changed in the 1950s with the release of the first medical studies that conclusively linked smoking and lung cancer. One response to these medical studies was the mass-marketing of the filter-tip cigarette. The idea behind the filter was to screen out tar and nicotine to make the cigarette “safer.” By the 1960s, filter cigarettes dominated the market. You can see this effect continuing even today. The brands of cigarettes that are “ultra low tar and nicotine” use a technique that involves tiny, invisible perforations in the filter. As smoke flows through the filter, quite a bit of air flows through the perforations and mixes in wit
