The chronicle of Eger Tobacco Factory

The cigarette factory

He was succeeded by Jenő Balogh, who up until then had been working as Eger’s assistant director, and this appointment was notable for the fact that Balogh was the first Eger- born man to direct the Eger factory. By 1936 things had calmed down considerably. 430,000 cigarettes of the “Levente” and “Drama” brands left the factory gates every day. It is interesting to make a comparative study and note that this quantity was easily equal to the output of two single cigarette-machines in the mechanised factories of Budapest. The cutting of the tobacco was eventually mechanised in Eger too, and ten machines arrived to roll the paper cigarette cartridges, glue them and section them. One machine could turn out 60,000 cartridges in a single day. The cigarettes were filled using the “Egyptian” method, as the hand-filling technique was then called. There is a story surrounding how the technique got this name. Apparently this name derives from the days of gunpowder firearms. During the Turco-Egyptian war in 1832 one of the Egyptian soldiers’ pipes is supposed to have broken, and the soldier, determined to have his smoke at all costs, filled the small paper cylinder (designed for topping up his gun with powder) with tobacco, set a light to it and smoked it. This invention is thought to have been the mother of the modern-day cigarette. In the Eger factory, the manual filling of the cigarette cartridges comprised three separate stages. First, dampened, pre-cut tobacco was placed on a folded piece of parchment, taking great care to use exactly the right amount. Then the parchment was pressed together, the cigarette cartridge was placed at one end and by dint of pushing from the other end with a small wooden stick, the tobacco was squeezed into the cigarette. Protruding strands of tobacco were then trimmed off with a pair of scissors. Finally the filled cigarettes were laid out to dry on large trays holding a thousand at a time, before eventually being packed into boxes.