Nobody smoked liked Humphrey Bogart, though just about everybody tried to. The hand cupped around the flame, the deep inhalation, the cigarette dangling from the lip, the steady eye through the gauzy smoke. Here was power, allure, vigor and sex. Bogey was the seductive power of the cigarette personified.

Everyone loved to see Bogart smoke, and no one was watching more avidly than the cigarette manufacturers and their marketing advisers. Perhaps most attentive of all was Edward Bernays, pioneer of public relations, wartime propagandist, nephew of Sigmund Freud, psychologist of smoking, and the man who probably did more than any other to glamorize the heady, fatal love affair between Americans and cigarettes.

Smoking is dying out. Today, the art of smoking on film is all but dead. Yet the appeal of on-screen smoking remains in our cultural bloodstream. The television series Mad Men, featuring Christina Hendricks as Joan Holloway, and the British Film Institute series on screen seductresses both celebrate the lost world of nicotine-chic. When Donald Draper lights up, or a screen siren blows a smoke ring, it still sends a jolt, an aesthetic buzz that is peculiar to cigarettes. We are still hooked. This is the legacy of Edward Bernays.

In a chilling memo to film producers, written in the 1950s, the golden age of smoking, Bernays laid out the various ways a cigarette could convey multiple meanings on screen. The “bashful hero” dragging on his smoke to summon up romantic courage; the “villain”, smoking in “hasty puffs”; the “gambler”, whose cigarette falls unlit from trembling fingers as the last throw of the dice fails; the “enraged crook”, crumbling a cigarette as he is finally double-crossed; the lover leaning in to light up the cigarette, and eyes, of his beloved … and so on.

“Everything,” Bernays declared, “from the gayest comedy to the most sinister tragedy can be expressed by a cigarette, in the hands or mouth of a skillful actor.”

This is only one example of the inspired and deeply calculating way in which cigarettes were implanted in the cultural landscape of America, and therefore the world. Sure, the chemicals in tobacco were addictive, and manipulated to make them more so, but America was also hooked on the idea of cigarettes. The cigarette penetrated the American way of life more deeply, quickly and dangerously than any other commercial product in history.

The medical and legal history of cigarette smoking is now well known. Less understood is the way that the cigarette came to reflect America’s perception of itself: this was a triumph of marketing, a moral tragedy, and a tribute to human ingenuity, mendacity and fallibility.

In many ways, cigarettes defined modern America. As Allan M. Brandt writes in his brilliant deconstruction of cigarette-smoking history: “The cigarette permeates 20th-century America as smoke fills an enclosed room.”

In 1905, cigarettes accounted for only 5per cent of tobacco use. Just half a century later, almost half of all adults smoked, sucking down an astonishing 350 billion cigarettes a year. By 2005 less than one quarter of the population still smoked cigarettes, and that proportion has continued to fall steadily. British cigarette smoking declined at the same rate. In 1948 about 53 per cent of adult Britons smoked (65 per cent of men and 41 per cent of women).

The transformation was partly technological and commercial - new methods of production, flue-curing that made the smoke easier to inhale and brought nicotine into the bloodstream in seconds - but it was also a matter of perception, brilliantly shaped by the cigarette producers and their psychologists.

In an age in which cigarettes have become stigmatized as antisocial, dirty and dangerous, it is easy to forget that the cigarette was once a byword for sociability, an icon of cultural sophistication, sexual attraction, freedom, youth and health. For men, cigarettes signified virility, mental strength and autonomy; for women, the same product was considered a mark of elegance and refinement, of social equality and independence.

Two wars helped to hook the Americans and the British. The sheer boredom and anxiety of the trenches was alleviated, to some extent, by cigarette smoking. A shared smoke was an act of camaraderie amid the violence, and even an act of patriotism. “When our boys light up, the Huns will light out,” tobacco companies assured the soldier-smokers. Even now, war and cigarettes go together. The iconic photograph of the Iraq War is that of Lance Corporal James Blake Miller in Fallujah, after 12 hours in combat. There is a bloody scratch on his nose - and a cigarette dangling from his lips. More than 100 newspapers have published it.

The cigarette swiftly became a ritual of adolescence, an easy and cheap form of rebellion. In 1917, T.S. Eliot brilliantly caught the uncertainty of an older generation towards this new smoking craze.

“Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked And danced all the modern dances; And her aunts were not quite sure How they felt about it, But they knew that it was modern.”

Smoking has always come wreathed by health warnings, but in the early 20th century the fear was more often a moral one: the suspicion that cigarettes, pleasurable and ephemeral, were the first step on a downward spiral of moral degradation, particularly for women, leading to drink and sexual depravity. Based on little more than personal conviction, Henry Ford declared that cigarette smoking led to immorality, and declined to employ smokers to make his cars: “Boys who smoke cigarettes we do not care to keep in our employ.”

The attempt to “protect” the “weaker sex” against tobacco, and the whiff of rectitude that accompanied campaigns to discourage women from smoking, had precisely the opposite effect. Sometimes the smoking rebellion was explicitly feminist. Ruth Hale, the American suffragist, encouraged her followers to light up a Lucky Strike to strike a blow for equality.

By the 1930s women were already smoking almost as heavily as their men folk, but mostly indoors. Bernays was deployed to flush them out into the open. “How can we get women to smoke in the street? Damn it, if they spend half their time outdoors and we can get ‘em to smoke outdoors, we’ll damn near double our female market.”

Huge amounts of effort and money went into aiming different brands of cigarette at various types of consumer. Cigarettes were also transformed into national brands, appealing equally across class, gender, age and race.

During the Depression, the marketeers again reshaped cigarettes to fit the moment. Advertising depicted the rich and famous puffing away in expensive locations: this reinforced the aspirational element in smoking, but it was also a great leveler, subtly limiting the distance between the impoverished many and wealthy few. “Here was a product and a behavior,” Brandt writes, “through which the distance between Hoboken and Hollywood could be easily traversed.”

By the 1950s, smokers hooked in the early part of the century were dying in increasing numbers, but as medical science began to catch up with the habit, so the industry moved one step ahead, by arguing that some cigarettes were simply better for you than others. Kindly, bespectacled doctors, some of the most respected and trusted figures in society, exhorted citizens to smoke specific brands.

“More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette,” insisted one famous advertisement. Others sought to imply that their brand actually reduced symptoms associated with smoking. “Luckies are less irritating … Your throat protection against cough.” “Give your throat a vacation, Smoke a Fresh cigarette.” Today this message seems extraordinary, and might be hilarious had the effects not been so tragic in terms of disease and death: Smoke more to alleviate the effects of … smoking.

Cigarettes were offered to an ever-more addicted public, with the promise that they would reduce weight, “stimulate digestion”, offer “a lift” to the frazzled modern man or woman, and improve their sex life. An advertisement for Lucky Strike showed a man in sailor’s uniform, leaning over a scantily clad woman beneath the legend: “Do you inhale? Everybody’s doing it.” Smoking was only one of the things everyone was doing, and the link could hardy have been more explicit.

Looking at the history of cigarette selling, it is clear that America’s notion of youth and beauty, and therefore of itself as a young and comely country, was irrevocably bound up with this single product. Early American cigarette posters are objects of extraordinary aesthetic appeal, at once stunning and deeply Machiavellian.

This is one of the more inspired aspects of Mad Men, the television series about Madison Avenue’s advertising kings of the 1960s, in which everyone smokes, more or less non-stop. The cast of Mad Men smoke during meetings, lunch and on first waking. They smoke before, after, and even during sex, with cigarette smoldering artfully in ashtray, but always they smoke beautifully, with self-consciousness in the ritual that is undoubtedly true to history.

Cigarettes, as everyone now knows (and the cigarette industry knew from early on) does not make you younger, sexier or better at digesting food: it makes you old looking, ill and, frequently, dead. But once science had established the incontrovertible link between smoking and lung cancer, the cigarette industry changed the rules of engagement, revealing once more a morally dubious adaptability in the face of reality.

Thanks to the wave of litigation that engulfed tobacco in the later part of the century, we know more about the inner-workings of the cigarette business than any other in history. Brandt is at his best tracing the slippery brilliance with which the cigarette makers clouded the issue: the health dangers of cigarettes were “unproven”, they argued, citing “alternative” opinions. Scientists prepared to challenge the idea of the killer cigarette were pushed forward, while armies of PRs ensured widespread coverage of their minority views.

“The industry insisted on scientific criteria that it knew full well could not be attained, then or ever.” Does this sound familiar: the demand for absolute proof, the fanning of a few skeptics to form a fully fledged, but basically bogus controversy? The challengers of global warming deploy an eerily similar set of tactics today.

As the evidence of primary and secondary smoking piled up, Big Tobacco resorted to the argument that smoking was a matter of individual choice, appealing to libertarian values and the historic antipathy towards big government in American society. Smoking was subtly reframed as a statement about American freedom

The ultimate emblem of this new tactic was Marlboro Man, invented in 1962 to rejuvenate an ailing brand hitherto associated with women smokers (“Marlboro - Mild as May”). Filmed to the tune of The Magnificent Seven, Marlboro Man declared: “For man’s flavour come to Marlboro Country. My Country. It’s big, open, makes the smoker feel ten feet tall … It’s like this country, has spirit …”

Here was the American way, in a lungful. Just as Marlboro Man stood up to the elements, so smokers could stand tall in the metaphorical saddle as they smoked against oppression. The advertisement harked backed to a simpler America, a mythical cowboy world free from interference and illness, where a man could smoke to his heart’s content, without fear of heart disease. Sales of Marlboro rocketed. Last year Marlboro Man was ranked No1 in a book entitled The 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived.

The real Marlboro Man was only too mortal. Wayne McLaren, an actor who had taken part in the campaign, developed lung cancer at the age of 49 from smoking at least 30 cigarettes a day. Just before he died, an anti-smoking television campaign featured shots of the rugged cowboy alongside footage of McLaren on his deathbed.

“Lying there with all those tubes in you, how independent can you really be?” the soundtrack asked.

By the 1990s smoking was a dying habit on both sides of the Atlantic. During that decade, more people would die from smoking than from Aids, car accidents, alcohol, murder, suicide, illegal drugs and fire combined. Yet the magic of smoking had gone, destroyed by regulation, awareness of the health risks and cultural change. Almost as amazing as the enthusiasm with which Britain and the US took up smoking was the speed with which we kicked the habit.

Bogart succumbed to cancer of the oesophagus in 1956. The language of cinematic smoking identified by Bernays has also gone; even the baddies are banned from smoking today. Mad Men carries a torch for the cigarette, but in the US just 21 per cent of adults still smoke, and in Britain the habit is eroding at a similar rate.

Yet worldwide, smoking is booming. As US consumption has dropped, American tobacco firms have pushed aggressively into new markets in the developing world. Cigarette exports by US companies more than tripled between 1975 and 1994. Forty per cent of today’s smokers live in East Asian countries; one hundred million Chinese men currently under the age of 29 will die from smoking. By 1984, Marlboro was China’s fourth largest advertiser. The Marlboro Man even invaded Cambodia.

While the West breathes easier, recovering from a cultural and physical addiction that lasted a century, the rest of the world faces a pandemic of disease, fueled by clever marketing. One billion people across the world are expected to die of tobacco-related disease in the course of this century.

Defying the odds and raking in the dollars, Marlboro Man still rides the range: beautiful, immortal and lethal.

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