G is for GUTTER
Every
year British smokers throw away about 80 thousand million butts and 4 billion
packets. But cigarettes don’t just end up in the gutter; they started life there as well.
In the 1500s sailors brought tobacco back to Europe as a luxury for the rich, who smoked it in pipes or rolled into cigars. But in the Spanish city of Seville, beggars picked up cigar stubs from the street, crumbled the old tobacco into scraps of paper, then smoked them.
The cigarette was born.