Gallaher's How To Do It Cigarette Cards: Old Tips That Still Work

Historical Household Tips: Reading Old Advice in Context

Long before online tutorials, smokers in Britain and Ireland could pick up a handy household tip every time they opened a packet. The tobacco company Gallaher printed a 100-card set called How To Do It, each card showing a small practical trick in a colour illustration on the front with instructions on the back. The New York Public Library holds a full set in its George Arents Collection and has scanned it, which is why these cards keep resurfacing as "100-year-old life hacks". Some of the tips are charmingly outdated. A surprising number still work.

The card above appears to show a classic outdoor trick: shaving thin curls into a matchstick so it catches more easily and burns longer when there is wind. Campers today call the same idea a feather stick, usually made from a larger piece of wood.

What the "How To Do It" cards are

Gallaher was one of the big names of British and Irish tobacco. Tom Gallaher founded the business in Derry in 1857, and it moved to York Street in Belfast in 1881; by the 1890s its Belfast works was described as the largest tobacco factory in the world. The firm later operated from Belfast and London, and it was eventually bought outright by Japan Tobacco in 2007.

Like its rivals, Gallaher issued long series of collectable cards. Many were educational: a 100-card set titled Why Is It, explaining everyday science, was issued in 1915. How To Do It belongs to the same family of instructive sets. The New York Public Library catalogues its copy without a date, so the familiar "100 years old" label is an estimate rather than a verified age. The style of the illustrations and the related sets suggest the early 20th century, but no exact year is confirmed in the sources we checked.

Why cigarette packs came with cards

Cigarette cards began as a practical fix. Early paper packs were flimsy, and manufacturers slipped a piece of card inside to stiffen them. It did not take long for companies to realise that the blank card was free advertising space.

In the United States, Allen & Ginter began issuing picture cards in 1879, featuring actresses, baseball players, boxers, flags and wild animals. British firms followed: W.D. & H.O. Wills included advertising cards from 1887, and John Player & Sons issued a general-interest set, Castles and Abbeys, in 1893. Soon sets of 25 or 50 subjects, and sometimes 100 or more, covered everything from footballers to birds, ships, first aid and gardening.

The aim was loyalty. If you wanted to complete a set, you kept buying the same brand. Cards stayed common into the 1940s, and paper saving during the Second World War helped bring the golden age of cigarette cards to an end. Today the hobby lives on among collectors, and organisations such as the Cartophilic Society of Great Britain catalogue thousands of sets.

Tips from the set that still work

The collage above brings together a selection of cards from the set. Among the tips highlighted by readers who browsed the NYPL scans are several that remain genuinely useful:

Fitting a candle that is too big for its holder. The card deals with an oversized candle and a narrow candlestick. A common modern fix is the same in spirit: soften the base in hot water and press it gently into shape.
Keeping a saucepan from boiling over. One card shows how to keep a pan lid raised. Letting a little steam escape is still the standard way to stop a pot boiling over.
Boiling potatoes well. Practical kitchen guidance about cooking potatoes evenly has not changed much in a century.
Making a cork fit a wine bottle. Softening a cork so it slides back into a bottle is handy for anyone who still opens bottles with natural corks.
Drawing a duck. Not every card was about emergencies. A simple step-by-step drawing lesson was a pleasant bonus for anyone, adult or child, with a pencil and a spare minute.

Tips that belong in a museum

Other cards are a window into a vanished household. Instructions for trimming lamp wicks assume a home lit by oil lamps. A tip for stopping an ink pot from spilling assumes that everyone writes with a dip pen. These cards are useless as advice today, but they are fascinating as history: they show what an ordinary person a century ago was expected to know how to fix, mend or improvise.

They also show how much household knowledge used to be passed around through everyday objects rather than through formal education. A smoker who never opened a book on home economics might still learn a dozen tricks from the cards in his pocket.

Use old advice with care

Vintage tips are fun, but they were written for different homes, different materials and different safety standards. Before trying one, it is worth asking a few questions:

Does it involve fire, chemicals or electricity? Methods that were normal with coal fires and oil lamps may be risky with modern furnishings, gas hobs or wiring.
Are the materials the same? Modern candles, corks, fabrics and pans are often made differently, so the old method may not behave as described.
Is there a better modern tool? Many problems the cards solve with ingenuity are now solved cheaply with a purpose-made gadget.

And of course, the cards came from a product that we now know causes serious harm. The cleverness of the marketing is part of the story: practical tips made a pack of cigarettes feel useful and friendly, at a time when the health risks of smoking were not widely understood.

How to see the full set

The NYPL Digital Collections site hosts the scanned cards, and the library has made medium-resolution images freely downloadable, with high-resolution files available for a fee. The library's collection of cigarette cards from around the world numbers about 100,000 catalogued items, so How To Do It is only a small part of it. Searching the site for "Gallaher How To Do It" is the quickest way in. Browsing the whole set is the best way to judge for yourself which tips have stood the test of time.

Sources: Boing Boing, 14 November 2015: 100 useful tips from a bygone era; Wikipedia: Gallaher Group; Wikipedia: Cigarette card; Cartophilic Society of Great Britain: Gallaher "Why Is It" (1915); Creighton University: Gallaher Ltd, Belfast & London card series. Cards from the George Arents Collection, New York Public Library. Story first shared via Collective Evolution.

For another historical visual collection to explore, see USDA Fruit Watercolors: How to Explore the Digital Archive.

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