James Albert Bonsack
James Albert Bonsack (October 9, 1859, – June 1, 1924) was an American inventor who developed an early cigarette rolling machine in 1880, and patented it the following year. Early life. James A. Bonsack was born in eastern Roanoke County, Virginia. His father, Jacob Bonsack owned a woolen mill, where James learned about industrial machinery. In 1878 he was admitted to Roanoke College, but decided to withdraw to work on designing a cigarette rolling machine. After building a successful prototype and patenting his invention, he registered the Bonsack Machine Company of Virginia on March 27, 1883. Bonsack Cigarette  Machine. Prior to that time, cigarettes had been rolled by hand. Readymade cigarettes were a luxury item, but were becoming increasingly popular. The slow manual fabrication process—a skilled cigarette roller could produce only about four cigarettes per minute on average—was insufficient to satisfy demand by the 1870s. In 1875, the Allen and Ginter company in Richmond, Virginia, offered a prize of US$75,000 (equal to $ today) for the invention of a machine able to roll cigarettes. Bonsack took up the challenge and left college to devote his time to building such a machine. In 1880, he had  a first working prototype, which was destroyed by a fire while in storage at Lynchburg, Virginia. Bonsack rebuilt it and filed a patent application on September 4, 1880. The patent was granted the following year (U.S. patents 238,640 from March 8, 1881 and 247,795 from October 4, 1881). Allen and Ginter had ordered a Bonsack machine but quickly rejected it, eager to save their prize money and fearing that consumers would balk at a machine-made product. Bonsack's partnership with tobacco industrialist James Buchanan Duke made full commercial use of the invention, which could produce 120,000 cigarettes in 10  hours, (200 per minute), and thereby revolutionized the cigarette industry. Legacy. The census-designated place of Bonsack, Virginia, located in Roanoke County, was named after James Bonsack, who lived in this town located along Route 460 between Roanoke and Bedford.