The Largest Cigar in the World, 1924

A vintage photo shows Marjorie Evans, six feet tall and weighing 250 lbs. smoking the largest cigar in the world at the 1924 National Tobacco Exposition in New York.

(© Bettmann/CORBIS)

Cigar consumption was on fire at the time with Americans puffing on nearly 4 million tons of cheroots each year. But even with the 5-foot-long, 40-pound prop cigar shown here, stogies were going the way of handlebar mustaches.

The cigar’s older, masculine image couldn’t compete with cigarettes’ modern and often feminine mystique. Targeting women with products such as Marlboros, cigarette makers watched their product nearly double in use from 1924 to 1939, while per-capita consumption of cigars declined almost 35 percent during the same span.