Lighters History

While cigarette lighters have spread around, in one shape or another, it was in 1926 when the first automatic cigarettes lighter was born. That year, the Ronson Art Metal Works requested for a U.S. patent for its "PRESS - it's lit, RELEASE - it's out, one finger - one motion" mechanism. Actually it was the first cigarettes lighter, the Banjo, retailed for $5.00 that period. In moderately good condition, it now easily realizes $100-200 at online cigarette stores today.

Since 1926, hundreds of millions of cigarette lighters were sold all over the world by such wide-known manufactures as Ronson, Zippo, Evans, Dunhill, Dupont, and Scripto and others like the omnipresent, non-refillable, disposable cigarettes lighters made of plastic.

Zippo cigarette lighters are especially popular with consumers nowadays.

In the course of many years plenty of Zippo cigarette lighters bearing the camel cigarette logo have been produced not only internally in the USA but also overseas. They were presented in the Camel Cash Catalogues; they were conjuncted with events such as the Camel Trophy Competition and the Camel Pool League; they were selling in Shops around the world, evidently many Camel cigarette lighters were offered through the RJR employee factory store.

In the late 1990's an effort was made to catalogue them. The Brian Snipes Camel Guides appeared in which the Zippos were not listed chronologically but numerated in the order of their discovery. The purpose of such a catalogues is to show some of the wide assortment of Camel Zippos produced by RJR to contribute to advertise their cigarettes.

We can just mention such well known collectible cigarette lighters as Bustah Camel Cigarette Lighter (Club Camel), Max Camel Cigarette Lighter (Club Camel), Floyd Camel Cigarette Lighter (Club Camel) and plenty of others.