What Is Vaping? How It Started and How It Actually Works

The device that started the entire vaping industry wasn't built to be trendy. It was built by a pharmacist who'd just watched his father die of lung cancer. That's the short version of how we got from cigarettes to the disposable or pre-filled pod sitting in a delivery box today, and it explains more about how these devices work than most people expect.

A vape doesn't burn anything. Inside every device (disposable, pod, or refillable), a small coil heats e-liquid until it turns to vapor, which you inhale. There's no combustion, no tobacco leaf, no ash. That's the entire mechanical difference between a cigarette and a vape: one burns plant matter to release nicotine, the other heats a liquid that already contains it.

The e-liquid itself is simple: a base of propylene glycol (PG) and vegetable glycerin (VG), flavoring, and nicotine at a fixed concentration. The two base liquids do different jobs. PG carries flavor more sharply and produces the tighter throat sensation closer to a cigarette, while VG is thicker and produces the bigger, softer vapor clouds people associate with modern disposables. Most e-liquids blend the two rather than using either alone, which is why two products at the same nicotine strength can still feel noticeably different to use.

Everything that varies between finished products, puff count, cloud size, flavor intensity, comes from how much of that liquid a device holds, how the coil heats it, and what ratio of PG to VG the manufacturer chose, not from a fundamentally different process. A coil is just a short length of resistance wire wrapped around a wicking material; run power through it and it heats the liquid soaked into the wick until it vaporizes. Higher wattage and lower coil resistance both produce more heat, and more heat means more vapor per puff, which is one reason a 900 mAh disposable battery and a rebuildable hardware setup can feel so different even at the same nicotine strength.

Strip away the flavour and the branding, and every vape on the market, disposable, pod, or refillable, is the same three parts in different packaging: a small rechargeable or single-use lithium battery, a coil that converts that battery's power into heat, and a reservoir holding the e-liquid the coil heats. What changes between a $15 disposable and a refillable setup is how those three parts are packaged, not what they fundamentally do.

Battery capacity is measured in milliamp-hours (mAh), the same unit used for phone batteries, and it roughly tracks with how long a device lasts between charges or before it's depleted for good on a disposable. A larger mAh rating generally means more puffs available per charge or per device, all else being equal, though the coil's power draw and how heavily you use it both affect that just as much as the raw battery number does. USB-C has become the standard charging port across nearly every device we carry, which matters practically: it means one cable works across most of the catalog, rather than needing a different charger for every brand.

Vaping feels like a recent phenomenon, mostly because disposables didn't take off until the last several years, but the underlying device is over two decades old. Hon Lik, a Chinese pharmacist, built the first modern e-cigarette in 2003 after losing his father to lung cancer. He wanted a way to deliver nicotine without burning tobacco. His employer, Ruyan, brought it to market in 2004, registered patents in more than 40 countries over the following years, and the device reached North American shelves by around 2006-2007.

There's an even earlier, failed attempt worth knowing about. American inventor Herbert Gilbert patented a "smokeless non-tobacco cigarette" concept back in 1963. It never made it to market (the technology and the timing weren't there yet), but it shows the idea of vaping instead of burning predates the modern device by 40 years.

What actually changed the market wasn't the core technology, which is roughly the same heating principle Hon Lik patented. It was device format, and that shift happened in stages. The first wave of e-cigarettes sold in North America were "cig-a-likes": small, cigarette-shaped devices with tiny disposable or refillable cartridges, weak batteries, and not much vapor. Around 2013 to 2017, larger box mods and refillable tanks took over among enthusiasts, chasing bigger clouds and adjustable settings, but that gear was bulky and needed real technical know-how to maintain. Sealed, high-nicotine pod systems simplified that considerably a few years later, and the sealed disposable, today's dominant format, simplified it again: no charging, no filling, no settings, just a device you open and use until it's empty.

That last shift is most of what we carry today, across Disposable, E-Juices, and Pre-Filled Pods. Manufacturing scale is a big part of why disposables specifically won out: once a factory can produce a fully sealed, pre-filled unit cheaply and consistently, the case for anything more complicated gets thin for most buyers. The pandemic-era years accelerated that shift further, as more buyers wanted something they could order online and use immediately with zero setup, rather than assembling a kit from separate parts.

Every vaping product sold legally in Canada is capped at 20 mg/mL nicotine concentration, under Health Canada's Nicotine Concentration in Vaping Products Regulations. That rule is far more recent than the technology itself: it came into force in July 2021, following a public consultation that ran from December 2020 into March 2021, meaning for most of vaping's history in Canada there was no federal ceiling at all. We cover exactly what that number means, how it's enforced, and why it landed where it did in our full breakdown of Canada's nicotine strength rules.

The practical result is simple. Every disposable, pod, and e-liquid bottle we carry is fixed at 20 mg/mL nicotine, the maximum allowed. That's not a brand choice. It's the legal ceiling, so it's consistent across every product on this site, and it's also why nicotine strength stops being a meaningful comparison point once you're actually choosing between brands here.

Vaping is not risk-free, and nicotine is addictive. Health Canada is explicit that vaping products are intended for adults who already use tobacco or nicotine products, not a starter habit, under the federal Tobacco and Vaping Products Act. Provinces layer their own rules on top of that federal framework, and they don't all set the same minimum age or the same enforcement approach, which is exactly why a single national number wouldn't actually describe the real legal landscape you're buying into. In Alberta, that's the Tobacco, Smoking and Vaping Reduction Act, enforced by Alberta Health Services, which sets the minimum purchase age at 18 and requires retailers to verify ID.

The minimum legal purchase age itself varies by province: 18 in Alberta, Manitoba and Quebec, 19 in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Nova Scotia and other provinces we ship to. We verify government-issued photo ID at delivery against whichever minimum applies to your province, not just at checkout, because a checkbox at checkout proves nothing about who actually opens the door. That's also why we only ship to provinces where these products are legal in the first place, rather than treating age verification as the only safeguard that matters.

Once you know the mechanics and the two legal ceilings above, the rest of the catalog is just variations on puff count, format, and flavour. Disposable covers the sealed, no-maintenance devices, with real puff counts ranging from smaller pens up to devices like the Orbito Lumo AI 120K, rated for 120,000 puffs, the highest capacity we carry. Pre-Filled Pods sits between disposables and full hardware: a reusable battery paired with sealed, swap-in pods. Hardware & Devices and Batteries cover the refillable side, where you buy the device and your e-liquid separately and manage refills yourself.

Puff count itself is worth understanding rather than just comparing as a bigger-is-better number. Manufacturers estimate it using a standard puff duration and volume in lab testing, not from how any specific person actually vapes. A shorter, lighter draw stretches a device further than the rated figure; a long, heavy draw on a high-wattage setting burns through it faster. Two people with the same 60,000-puff disposable can genuinely get different real-world results, which is normal and not a sign either device is faulty.

If you're deciding between device types, the practical differences (no charging vs. charging, single-use vs. refillable) matter more than the history. We walk through exactly that in our guide to actually using a vape. If you already know you want something simple, a sealed device from Flavour Beast or Oxbar needs nothing but opening the package.

None of this requires memorizing chemistry or regulatory history before your first order. The two things actually worth carrying forward from everything above are the two hard numbers: 20 mg/mL is the nicotine ceiling on everything legally sold here, and the minimum age to buy is set by your province, checked with real ID at your door. Everything else, disposable vs. pod vs. hardware, flavour, puff count, is a matter of preference, not regulation, and none of it is worth agonizing over on a first order since switching brands or formats later costs nothing but trying something new.