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It’s really amazing just what extent people went to in order to smoke. Apparently people smoked on submarines for a while. And planes. And everywhere else. S

It’s really amazing just what extent people went to in order to smoke. Apparently people smoked on submarines for a while. And planes. And everywhere else. Smoking is just such a disease and it feels like only now are we kind of getting a handle on it.

graceful6800 5mo ago
Several years ago I had a brief stop at some airport-- maybe Atlanta? But they had an indoor smoking area. I smoked at the time so I followed the map, and you could see the smoking area from the balcony on the floor above. It was a glass cube maybe 10 feet across, and it was crammed full of people. Completely full, like those Japanese trains. And there was a crowd of people outside waiting to get in. I went outside. It was pretty nice, there was no one around.
allenrb 5mo ago
I’ve been told by someone who was in the service that when smoking was no longer allowed on submarines, it made a huge difference in the cleanliness of machinery and thus how much work was required to maintain it. Yeah, I’d love some of that goodness in my lungs, please.
Stratoscope 5mo ago
Of course there were smoking and non-smoking sections on airplanes. The same air recirculated through the entire airplane, and the non-smoking section began the very next row after the smoking section.
- kortilla 5mo ago
  Air isn’t recirculated on an airplane. It’s continually brought in from outside the aircraft
  - helloplanets 5mo ago
    50% is recirculated, 50% is from the outside. Before the 80's it was 100% from the outside, though.
    - ses1984 5mo ago
      That statistic doesn’t mean much. The question is how long does it take for all the air in the plane to be replaced.
  - Stratoscope 5mo ago
    [dead]
- RobotToaster 5mo ago
  Fun fact, the air quality on aeroplanes got worse after they banned smoking, because they could cut costs by re-circulating the same air for longer.
  - 7jjjjjjj 5mo ago
    Recirculated air is still a thousand times cleaner than air with cigarette smoke in it.
    - IAmBroom 5mo ago
      You are naively assuming the only really dangerous part of recirculated air is nicotine byproducts. Bacteria and virus loads are far more dangerous. Cigarettes take longer than a couple weeks to kill.
hnlmorg 5mo ago
Unfortunately we aren’t getting a handle on it because those friendly tobacco companies instead just pushed people to vaping instead.
- kortilla 5mo ago
  That’s still getting a handle on it. Vaping is not good but it’s significantly better than the tar that comes from burning cigarettes
  - dangus 5mo ago
    In the context of the alternative which was “nobody really smokes or vapes” it’s not really a good outcome. Sure, smoking rates cratered. It was great. But now vaping rates have gone up and it just didn’t have to happen that way at all. Go back a few years and less people vaped with similarly low smoking rates. Vaping didn’t replace smoking, its net new usage.
    - IAmBroom 5mo ago
      Citation needed.
    - JuniperMesos 5mo ago
      I'm not sure this is actually bad. Nicotine, when divorced from the tar of burning cigarettes, has a number of desirable affects on alertness and appetite (as well as less desirable effects like increasing blood pressure) - it's not clear to me that avoiding nicotine as a stimulant is always desirable. As well, vaping is so much less obnoxious to the people around you than traditional smoking (either tobacco or marijuana). I'm in favor of a lot of the social and legal pressure that has been put on smoking tobacco in public (and I think it should apply to weed as well despite being pro-legalization). But most of the actual issues go away if it's vaping and of smoking (and all of them go away if you're getting your tobacco via a pouch).
      - hnlmorg 5mo ago
Someone 5mo ago
> Apparently people smoked on submarines for a while. More than ‘a while’. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4344412/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4344412/: “In the mid 1970s smoking was allowed virtually everywhere; by 2000 there were only two allowable smoking areas-each approximately 6 feet by 6 feet-one in the engine room and one up forward. […] In 2009, a working group was established to prepare for a December 31, 2010 deadline for prohibiting smoking below decks on deployed submarines” That paper also says: “In 1993, based on reports of the dangers of secondhand smoke, Captain Stanley W. Bryant, the commanding officer of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, announced a ban on smoking aboard the ship starting in July 1993 and proposed eliminating tobacco from the ship's store. These actions elicited a strong and swift tobacco industry response. As described by Offen et al., tobacco friendly members of Congress challenged the policies and enough pressure was generated to force the reversal of both the ban on smoking and the prohibition of cigarette sales aboard the ship”
- mpyne 5mo ago
  My time in submarines at sea just coincided with the last few years where smoking on submarines was still authorized. It was awful, just awful. Especially in a space as cramped as a submarine and with a common ventilation system, you can't just put the smokers in a convenient spot all to themselves, they're always going to be near something the rest of the crew needs to access.
  - Gravityloss 5mo ago
    I bet some individuals would bring back smoking in submarines in a heartbeat, if offered suitable sponsoring...
-warren 5mo ago
Story time. Last summer I flew from ATL to SFO on a brand new Airbus. Pretty cool plane! Halfway across the count I had the obligatory restroom break. In the head, I noticed an ashtray. I was confused -- "smoking has been banned in planes doe decades. Why is there an ashtray here?" I flagged down a flight attendant and asked them. Their answer was that yes smoking is banned, and it's a $250 fine. But EVERY SINGLE TRIP from ATL to SFO, someone decided it is worth it and the ash trays give them a safe place to put it out. The flight attendants wait outside the lav after the smoke alarm goes off with the ticket.
- Sebguer 5mo ago
  It's actually mandated by the FAA that an ashtray be present in the restrooms: > (g) Regardless of whether smoking is allowed in any other part of the airplane, lavatories must have self-contained, removable ashtrays located conspicuously on or near the entry side of each lavatory door, except that one ashtray may serve more than one lavatory door if the ashtray can be seen readily from the cabin side of each lavatory served. And the plane literally cannot fly with an inoperable or missing ashtray.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - RugnirViking 5mo ago
    what makes an inoperable ashtray? full? holes in the bottom? I suppose the idea makes sense but the wording is amusing - I think of ashtrays as a static object, I can't imagine myself "operating" an ashtray
    - r3trohack3r 5mo ago
      They are typically a V shaped receptacle that is flush with the wall and flips out. The hinge jamming or becoming detached would make it inoperable.
  - -warren 5mo ago
    Ok now thats wild!
qingcharles 5mo ago
Cinemas were the annoying ones for me, even more so than airplanes. I remember going to see E.T. when it came out and the cloud of smoke from all the parents puffing away made it hard to see the damned screen.
nickjj 5mo ago
It's also very dependent on where you live I think. I'm in NY (not NYC) and it's rare to find anyone smoking. When I visited Türkiye last year, I've never seen so much smoking in my life. Not just walking around the streets, but people smoking at restaurants that had seats outside. This could be a small place with 3-4 tables all within a couple of meters of each other.
- ReptileMan 5mo ago
  Check the ancient shows Sex and the City and The nanny ... and you will see a different NY.
  - steveBK123 5mo ago
    Yes, its incredible how much the culture around smoking changed in 25 years
roysting 5mo ago
It was one of my first thoughts too, but related to that somewhat is that it also amazes me how people used to be a lot more “daring” or “pragmatic” (the quotes indicating that I’m not quite sure what to call it) in a way that did not scare them to consider and weigh the risks and conclude that it was not only feasible and possible, but that it was also worth adding a smoking room to a hydrogen filled balloon. There are many other similar examples of this “daring” that seems to have all but been neutered by globalist standardization that has all but destroyed actual diversity in the West and has seemingly lowered tolerances of and for risk. I’m not sure if it’s quite the same and maybe it’s just a function of the technology levels of roughly up to the 1990s, but it feels like China in general has something similar to that same kind of “daring” today, based on the unique and innovative things I see in China.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- Liftyee 5mo ago
  I also suspect the modern digital news cycle and potential lawsuits have impacted the levels of risk acceptable. In China, with devastation in living memory, the population are generally willing to take more risks, and there's less of a culture of litigation. Plus, there's always the government who can dampen any viral social media outburst. Of course, some standards (fire safety) are important. Looser standards are allowable where the customer can make a reasoned judgement of risk.
- WalterBright 5mo ago
  > adding a smoking room to a hydrogen filled balloon Is it really all that different from an airplane filled with aviation gas? There are plenty of terrible crashes from planes that caught fire in the air, and just about every crash into the ground results in a terrific fire.
TacticalCoder 5mo ago
> It’s really amazing just what extent people went to in order to smoke. My parents' generation, the boomers, weren't really aware that smoking was bad. Even if some knew, I feel like it was mostly hidden from them. Look at any movie they'd watch in the west when they were young, people would be smoking everywhere: inside offices, inside cars, public servants at the town hall, etc. Smokers everywhere. Once the studies eventually came out showing how bad it was, addicted people kept smoking but there's been way less new smokers. Now I see my kid's gen (so the grand-kids of the boomers): hardly anyone is smoking. It's not a thing among that generation. As to the gen Xer who used to smoke: most of friends in that segment are now vaping. Addicts are typically going to be addicts: be it alcohol or tobacco. We're getting a handle on it for the boomers are now dying left and right and it's been a long time smoking ain't being portrayed as being cool anymore.
- WalterBright 5mo ago
  > My parents' generation, the boomers, weren't really aware that smoking was bad. As a boomer, I say "baloney". For starters, my dad grew up in the Depression. His schoolmates called them "coffin nails". Doctors routinely prescribed "stop smoking, you fool". In 7th grade, one of my teachers (incidentally, a Holocaust survivor), smoked constantly. He'd also spend half of class time coughing up a lung. My best friend in high school smoked constantly, and told him his doctor told him his lungs were damaged and he better quit. He kept smoking. But the worst was when I was 8, and toured an agricultural museum at K State. There were two jars with lungs in them, one from a non-smoker, and the other a smoker. The non-smoker lungs were pink and looked healthy. The smokers - black! All black! It was horrific. Besides, anyone who cut open a dead body knew instantly if the deceased was a smoker. No sane person would conclude the black, scarred lung was healthy. All the boomers knew the bad effects of smoking. They just thought they were invulnerable.
  - DaedalusII 5mo ago
    it also did not seem to impact lifespan for them dying in your 60s was par for the course until second half of the 20th century. lead petrol, cigs, war, asbestos, lead paint in children bedroom
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
WalterBright 5mo ago
I don't know if sailors can smoke on an aircraft carrier, but with all that gas and bombs around, it seems like a no-brainer to ban it. As a former Air Force brat, I remember the horrific stench of stale smoke in the AF office buildings. My parents were about the only adults I knew who didn't smoke. I bought my 72 Dodge in the 1980's, and it still smells like cigarettes.
dbcurtis 5mo ago
It was part of the culture in the 1960's, and only started to change somewhat during the 1970's. Everybody had ash trays, even in non-smoking households, so that you could bring them out for guests. Nobody gave it a second thought. Clay ash trays were common elementary school arts & crafts projects. One of the things that reminded me of how much a part of the culture it was, is when we visited the Computer History Museum. The SAGE system display had several operator consoles -- each with an ash tray and an automotive-type cigarette lighter in the panel.
rob74 5mo ago
Yeah, that was my first thought too - why not just ban smoking on the airship altogether? But then again, before smoke detectors were invented, it was better to provide a place where people could smoke under monitored conditions than have them smoke clandestinely somewhere where it might be dangerous...
wvh 5mo ago
The alternative is/was of course to be stuck in a small space for several days with smokers showing withdrawal symptoms. Not sure I'd want to experience that in something like a submarine...

graceful6800 5mo ago

Several years ago I had a brief stop at some airport-- maybe Atlanta? But they had an indoor smoking area. I smoked at the time so I followed the map, and you could see the smoking area from the balcony on the floor above. It was a glass cube maybe 10 feet across, and it was crammed full of people. Completely full, like those Japanese trains. And there was a crowd of people outside waiting to get in. I went outside. It was pretty nice, there was no one around.

allenrb 5mo ago

I’ve been told by someone who was in the service that when smoking was no longer allowed on submarines, it made a huge difference in the cleanliness of machinery and thus how much work was required to maintain it. Yeah, I’d love some of that goodness in my lungs, please.

Stratoscope 5mo ago

Of course there were smoking and non-smoking sections on airplanes. The same air recirculated through the entire airplane, and the non-smoking section began the very next row after the smoking section.

kortilla 5mo ago
Air isn’t recirculated on an airplane. It’s continually brought in from outside the aircraft
- helloplanets 5mo ago
  50% is recirculated, 50% is from the outside. Before the 80's it was 100% from the outside, though.
  - ses1984 5mo ago
    That statistic doesn’t mean much. The question is how long does it take for all the air in the plane to be replaced.
- Stratoscope 5mo ago
  [dead]
RobotToaster 5mo ago
Fun fact, the air quality on aeroplanes got worse after they banned smoking, because they could cut costs by re-circulating the same air for longer.
- 7jjjjjjj 5mo ago
  Recirculated air is still a thousand times cleaner than air with cigarette smoke in it.
  - IAmBroom 5mo ago
    You are naively assuming the only really dangerous part of recirculated air is nicotine byproducts. Bacteria and virus loads are far more dangerous. Cigarettes take longer than a couple weeks to kill.

hnlmorg 5mo ago

Unfortunately we aren’t getting a handle on it because those friendly tobacco companies instead just pushed people to vaping instead.

kortilla 5mo ago
That’s still getting a handle on it. Vaping is not good but it’s significantly better than the tar that comes from burning cigarettes
- dangus 5mo ago
  In the context of the alternative which was “nobody really smokes or vapes” it’s not really a good outcome. Sure, smoking rates cratered. It was great. But now vaping rates have gone up and it just didn’t have to happen that way at all. Go back a few years and less people vaped with similarly low smoking rates. Vaping didn’t replace smoking, its net new usage.
  - IAmBroom 5mo ago
    Citation needed.
  - JuniperMesos 5mo ago
    I'm not sure this is actually bad. Nicotine, when divorced from the tar of burning cigarettes, has a number of desirable affects on alertness and appetite (as well as less desirable effects like increasing blood pressure) - it's not clear to me that avoiding nicotine as a stimulant is always desirable. As well, vaping is so much less obnoxious to the people around you than traditional smoking (either tobacco or marijuana). I'm in favor of a lot of the social and legal pressure that has been put on smoking tobacco in public (and I think it should apply to weed as well despite being pro-legalization). But most of the actual issues go away if it's vaping and of smoking (and all of them go away if you're getting your tobacco via a pouch).
    - hnlmorg 5mo ago

Someone 5mo ago

> Apparently people smoked on submarines for a while. More than ‘a while’. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4344412/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4344412/: “In the mid 1970s smoking was allowed virtually everywhere; by 2000 there were only two allowable smoking areas-each approximately 6 feet by 6 feet-one in the engine room and one up forward. […] In 2009, a working group was established to prepare for a December 31, 2010 deadline for prohibiting smoking below decks on deployed submarines” That paper also says: “In 1993, based on reports of the dangers of secondhand smoke, Captain Stanley W. Bryant, the commanding officer of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, announced a ban on smoking aboard the ship starting in July 1993 and proposed eliminating tobacco from the ship's store. These actions elicited a strong and swift tobacco industry response. As described by Offen et al., tobacco friendly members of Congress challenged the policies and enough pressure was generated to force the reversal of both the ban on smoking and the prohibition of cigarette sales aboard the ship”

mpyne 5mo ago
My time in submarines at sea just coincided with the last few years where smoking on submarines was still authorized. It was awful, just awful. Especially in a space as cramped as a submarine and with a common ventilation system, you can't just put the smokers in a convenient spot all to themselves, they're always going to be near something the rest of the crew needs to access.
- Gravityloss 5mo ago
  I bet some individuals would bring back smoking in submarines in a heartbeat, if offered suitable sponsoring...

-warren 5mo ago

Story time. Last summer I flew from ATL to SFO on a brand new Airbus. Pretty cool plane! Halfway across the count I had the obligatory restroom break. In the head, I noticed an ashtray. I was confused -- "smoking has been banned in planes doe decades. Why is there an ashtray here?" I flagged down a flight attendant and asked them. Their answer was that yes smoking is banned, and it's a $250 fine. But EVERY SINGLE TRIP from ATL to SFO, someone decided it is worth it and the ash trays give them a safe place to put it out. The flight attendants wait outside the lav after the smoke alarm goes off with the ticket.

Sebguer 5mo ago
It's actually mandated by the FAA that an ashtray be present in the restrooms: > (g) Regardless of whether smoking is allowed in any other part of the airplane, lavatories must have self-contained, removable ashtrays located conspicuously on or near the entry side of each lavatory door, except that one ashtray may serve more than one lavatory door if the ashtray can be seen readily from the cabin side of each lavatory served. And the plane literally cannot fly with an inoperable or missing ashtray.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- RugnirViking 5mo ago
  what makes an inoperable ashtray? full? holes in the bottom? I suppose the idea makes sense but the wording is amusing - I think of ashtrays as a static object, I can't imagine myself "operating" an ashtray
  - r3trohack3r 5mo ago
    They are typically a V shaped receptacle that is flush with the wall and flips out. The hinge jamming or becoming detached would make it inoperable.
- -warren 5mo ago
  Ok now thats wild!

qingcharles 5mo ago

Cinemas were the annoying ones for me, even more so than airplanes. I remember going to see E.T. when it came out and the cloud of smoke from all the parents puffing away made it hard to see the damned screen.

nickjj 5mo ago

It's also very dependent on where you live I think. I'm in NY (not NYC) and it's rare to find anyone smoking. When I visited Türkiye last year, I've never seen so much smoking in my life. Not just walking around the streets, but people smoking at restaurants that had seats outside. This could be a small place with 3-4 tables all within a couple of meters of each other.

ReptileMan 5mo ago
Check the ancient shows Sex and the City and The nanny ... and you will see a different NY.
- steveBK123 5mo ago
  Yes, its incredible how much the culture around smoking changed in 25 years

roysting 5mo ago

It was one of my first thoughts too, but related to that somewhat is that it also amazes me how people used to be a lot more “daring” or “pragmatic” (the quotes indicating that I’m not quite sure what to call it) in a way that did not scare them to consider and weigh the risks and conclude that it was not only feasible and possible, but that it was also worth adding a smoking room to a hydrogen filled balloon. There are many other similar examples of this “daring” that seems to have all but been neutered by globalist standardization that has all but destroyed actual diversity in the West and has seemingly lowered tolerances of and for risk. I’m not sure if it’s quite the same and maybe it’s just a function of the technology levels of roughly up to the 1990s, but it feels like China in general has something similar to that same kind of “daring” today, based on the unique and innovative things I see in China.

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
Liftyee 5mo ago
I also suspect the modern digital news cycle and potential lawsuits have impacted the levels of risk acceptable. In China, with devastation in living memory, the population are generally willing to take more risks, and there's less of a culture of litigation. Plus, there's always the government who can dampen any viral social media outburst. Of course, some standards (fire safety) are important. Looser standards are allowable where the customer can make a reasoned judgement of risk.
WalterBright 5mo ago
> adding a smoking room to a hydrogen filled balloon Is it really all that different from an airplane filled with aviation gas? There are plenty of terrible crashes from planes that caught fire in the air, and just about every crash into the ground results in a terrific fire.

TacticalCoder 5mo ago

> It’s really amazing just what extent people went to in order to smoke. My parents' generation, the boomers, weren't really aware that smoking was bad. Even if some knew, I feel like it was mostly hidden from them. Look at any movie they'd watch in the west when they were young, people would be smoking everywhere: inside offices, inside cars, public servants at the town hall, etc. Smokers everywhere. Once the studies eventually came out showing how bad it was, addicted people kept smoking but there's been way less new smokers. Now I see my kid's gen (so the grand-kids of the boomers): hardly anyone is smoking. It's not a thing among that generation. As to the gen Xer who used to smoke: most of friends in that segment are now vaping. Addicts are typically going to be addicts: be it alcohol or tobacco. We're getting a handle on it for the boomers are now dying left and right and it's been a long time smoking ain't being portrayed as being cool anymore.

WalterBright 5mo ago
> My parents' generation, the boomers, weren't really aware that smoking was bad. As a boomer, I say "baloney". For starters, my dad grew up in the Depression. His schoolmates called them "coffin nails". Doctors routinely prescribed "stop smoking, you fool". In 7th grade, one of my teachers (incidentally, a Holocaust survivor), smoked constantly. He'd also spend half of class time coughing up a lung. My best friend in high school smoked constantly, and told him his doctor told him his lungs were damaged and he better quit. He kept smoking. But the worst was when I was 8, and toured an agricultural museum at K State. There were two jars with lungs in them, one from a non-smoker, and the other a smoker. The non-smoker lungs were pink and looked healthy. The smokers - black! All black! It was horrific. Besides, anyone who cut open a dead body knew instantly if the deceased was a smoker. No sane person would conclude the black, scarred lung was healthy. All the boomers knew the bad effects of smoking. They just thought they were invulnerable.
- DaedalusII 5mo ago
  it also did not seem to impact lifespan for them dying in your 60s was par for the course until second half of the 20th century. lead petrol, cigs, war, asbestos, lead paint in children bedroom

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

WalterBright 5mo ago

I don't know if sailors can smoke on an aircraft carrier, but with all that gas and bombs around, it seems like a no-brainer to ban it. As a former Air Force brat, I remember the horrific stench of stale smoke in the AF office buildings. My parents were about the only adults I knew who didn't smoke. I bought my 72 Dodge in the 1980's, and it still smells like cigarettes.

dbcurtis 5mo ago

It was part of the culture in the 1960's, and only started to change somewhat during the 1970's. Everybody had ash trays, even in non-smoking households, so that you could bring them out for guests. Nobody gave it a second thought. Clay ash trays were common elementary school arts & crafts projects. One of the things that reminded me of how much a part of the culture it was, is when we visited the Computer History Museum. The SAGE system display had several operator consoles -- each with an ash tray and an automotive-type cigarette lighter in the panel.

rob74 5mo ago

Yeah, that was my first thought too - why not just ban smoking on the airship altogether? But then again, before smoke detectors were invented, it was better to provide a place where people could smoke under monitored conditions than have them smoke clandestinely somewhere where it might be dangerous...

wvh 5mo ago

The alternative is/was of course to be stuck in a small space for several days with smokers showing withdrawal symptoms. Not sure I'd want to experience that in something like a submarine...