Manufacture and Decline
During the early- to mid-20th century, exploding cigars were a popular practical joke device, frequently advertised and mentioned in newspapers of the era. Despite their popularity, the history of the exploding cigar's development is apparently not well documented, including how, where and when they first appeared. The largest manufacturer and purveyor of exploding cigars in the United States during the middle of the last century was the S. S. Adams Company which, according to The Saturday Evening Post, made more exploding cigars and other gag novelty items as of 1946 than its next eleven competitors combined.
The company was founded by Soren Sorensen Adams, dubbed "king of the professional pranksters", who invented and patented many common gag novelties such as sneezing powder, itching powder, the dribble glass and the joy buzzer. The largest New York based manufacturer of exploding cigars was Richard Appel, a German refugee from Nuremberg who in or about 1940 opened a gag novelty factory on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
By the time exploding cigars were being turned out by manufacturers such as Adams and Appel, the chemical explosive variety had fallen out of favor. According to Adams, the large-scale switch to a non-chemical device occurred in approximately 1915 in the aftermath of a death caused by a homemade exploding cigar rigged with dynamite. Though exploding cigars were not normally rigged with dynamite but with explosive caps using a less powerful incendiary, following the incident, a number of U.S. states banned the product altogether. The replacement for chemical explosives was a metal spring mechanism, bound with cord—as the victim puffed away, the cord burned through causing the device to spring open, thus rupturing the cigar's end.
Prank exploding cigars have caused many injuries over their history. For example, in 1902 one Edward Weinschreider sued a cigar shop for an exploding cigar which burned his hand so badly three of his fingers had to be amputated. As has been observed by one legal scholar, "he utility of the exploding cigar is so low and the risk of injury so high as the warrant a conclusion that the cigar is defective and should not have been marketed at all." Laws have been enacted banning the sale of exploding cigars entirely, such as Chapter 178 of Massachusetts' Acts and Resolves, passed by its legislature in 1967.
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