Chapter 2 
that 100 are successfully smoked. Common technical problems that 
can cause a filter pad to be discarded include lighting failures and port 
leaks. During the last year of the FTC laboratory's operation, fewer than 
300 varieties of cigarettes were tested, and the testing cycle (which included 
curing, marking, and smoking the cigarettes, etc.) lasted approximately 
12 months. There were 933 cigarette varieties rated by the TITL in the 
Commission's 1994 report. 
The author once had the opportunity to ask Dr. Ogg (who worked as a 
tobacco chemist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture) how he came up 
with the specific parameters of his protocol. He said that he had based them 
on observations of how people smoke under different conditions. He had 
spent a lot of time watching people smoke (at the office, on the street, etc.), 
sometimes timing them with a stopwatch. His observations told him that 
people smoked differently under different conditions. For example, someone 
deep in thought might take only one or two puffs before the cigarette burned 
out, whereas someone who seemed extremely nervous might puff constantly. 
In short, there was no such thing as an "average" smoker and no way to 
derive a set of testing parameters that would replicate actual human smoking, 
so Dr. Ogg had to select parameters that seemed reasonable in light of his 
observations.^ Dr. Ogg also collected cigarette butts from ash trays in hotels, 
restaurants, and offices and measured how long they were; the resulting 
average length became the butt length called for by his protocol. 
When the Commission adopted a slightly modified version of the 
Cambridge Filter method in 1967 for use in its newly opened cigarette testing 
laboratory, it was the author's opinion that the Commission's procedures (as 
implemented on the 20-port smoking machine selected by the Commission) 
were clearly superior to all other methods currently in use at that time. The 
FTC method had its limitations, most significantly that the information it 
generated would not tell any individual smoker how much tar and nicotine 
he or she would get from a particular brand of cigarette. However, there was 
simply no way to get that information, and the FTC method did provide a 
smoker with accurate comparative information about the relative amounts 
of tar and nicotine delivered by various cigarettes when they were smoked 
in precisely the same manner. In addition, it provided a uniform analytical 
procedure that could be replicated in different laboratories simultaneously 
and in the same laboratory over time; therefore, not only could many brands 
of cigarettes be compared with each other at any time, but long-term pictures 
of tar and nicotine levels over the years also were possible. 
® During the December 5-6, 1994, National Cancer Institute conference, it was learned that a protocol using 
the same parameters for the testing of cigarettes had been proposed by The American Tobacco Company 
researchers many years before Dr. Ogg published his article (Bradford et al., 1936) ("arbitrarily" selecting a 
2-second, 35-mL puff once a minute, although another researcher who had studied human smoking habits 
used a 40-mL puff). 
11 
