How Box Mods Invented Vaping As We Know

Despite how new vaping is in relative terms, only celebrating its 20th birthday in 2024, there have already been several generations of e-cigarettes that a vape supplier can sell, most of which are still sold in upgraded forms to this day.

The first type of the kind patented by Dr Hon Lik was designed to resemble a cigar and later a long cigarette with the belief at the time that this would help smokers switch, inventing what is now known as the cigalike.

It was popular to a point, but also the tiny hardware was an issue for some early adopters for the same reasons patches and gum could be; try as it might, its nicotine delivery was not powerful enough.

This has since been fixed thanks to improved technology and better vape juice and salt mixes, but the first solutions that brought out the full potential of vaping in its own right as opposed to being a substitute for smoking came from no major company at all.

What Makes A Box A Mod?

For people new to the vaping scene either as users or sellers, the term “box mod” can seem somewhat strange, especially since most box mods you can buy today are not really intended to be modified outside of using and swapping out compatible coils and tanks.

However, in the early days of the Ruyan and the relative disappointment a lot of ex-smokers had with them, the potential vapes had was obvious but their form factor was holding them back in a big way.

Because the core design is relatively simple and only a specific aerosol generation method (Dr Lik’s ultrasound) had actually been patented, you could create a vape by repurposing a flashlight, wood from a box and using some off-the-shelf parts and a bit of electromechanical knowledge.

The result, thanks to more powerful batteries and the stability of a torch tube would be much larger and bulkier but significantly more versatile, effective and long-lasting, as well as allowing you to use your own vape juice which was not always a given at the time.

This led to some interesting standards emerging. Almost every single tank and atomiser uses a 510 threading format these days, which was established by the early box modders, as was the use of the 18650 standard lithium-ion battery that is now used in every box mod.

Eventually, the system caught on and the initial modding generation started to build professional premium kits for others using the same principle but far more robust parts.

This became so popular that other major manufacturers entered the scene and produced cheaper box mod systems and that helped drive people to try vaping for themselves instead of smoking.

As time passed, these systems would see competition from pod and cartridge vapes that were easier to use and were semi-sustainable and disposable vapes that were very cheap and could offer smokers an affordable way to try vaping for themselves to see if it would work.

However, the moment that the e-cigarette was split from vaping can be found when the box mods began to take over.