Way back when I was a junior in high school, my mother said she would buy me a good manual typewriter or if I wanted to spend $20 or $30 of my own money, she would buy an electric typewriter.

I went with manual. First, I was cheap. Second, I thought, why in the world would I need electricity to operate a typewriter? Not that electricity was new when I was a junior in high school. I'm not that old.

That typewriter was used to type many a report, including a 30-pager on the history of radio for college English (a high school class) and plenty of western civilization reports. It followed me to college where I polished my typing skills and learned more about footnotes and endnotes and the like.

I bring up the subject because I got an e-mail the other day from a company that manufactures something else that now takes electricity. Something I never thought would require power, just life the old typewriter. It's a cigarette.

I've always found cigarettes to be disgusting. They are smelly, they make people stink. It turns teeth and fingers yellow and it wreaks havoc on the body, causing strokes, heart attacks and all kinds of cancers.

And for years, it has been expensive. When I was a kid there were vending machines and cigarettes cost 35 cents a pack. Why they placed cigarettes in vending machines I'll never know. Well, I have a theory. It was an easy way for kids to get them and create life-long (however short) customers.

But as the years wore on we learned more about the destructive aspects of cigarettes and if that didn't make you quit or not start, prices got higher and higher.

Recently a federal tax on cigarettes jumped 62 cents a pack. A carton of cigarettes that once cost $49 (more than a price of a standard DVD player) suddenly cost $58 each. Ouch!

Welcome nicotine fiends and interested bystanders, please allow me to introduce Craig Youngblood, Steve Youngblood, Simon Lu, David Allen Baker and Gino Ferrare. They are five business people who created InLife in 2007.

And indeed they are marketing an electronic cigarette.

Bruce Conner, an InLife distributor, wrote in an e-mail, “Electronic cigarettes produce simulated smoke with no tobacco, and they do not produce second-hand smoke.

“InLife believes in choices. The company was founded based on the fact that many smokers want to have a choice while continuing to smoke. With InLife’s electronic cigarettes, smokers really can have their cigarettes and smoke them too!”

Conner says InLife gives consumers numerous choices, from low nicotine to no nicotine — so smokers can personalize their smoking experience based on their own desires and budget.

So, how do electronic cigarettes produce smoke when there is no actual smoke? It's not smoke, actually, but a vapor mist that looks, feels, tastes and reacts much like tobacco smoke. When exhaled, the vapor harmlessly evaporates in the air within a matter of seconds. The mist is produced by an atomizer along with a flavored cartridge that contains a controlled amount of nicotine, or even none at all if the nicotine-free option is selected.

Now here's the clincher: The company has testimonials by doctors on how safe it is! Wow! But wait, I seem to remember seeing a copy of the first Life magazine back in the 30s that included cigarette advertising in which a doctor urged his patients to smoke a specific-brand cigarette between each course at Thanksgiving to get the juices flowing and help the digestive process.

But who knows? Maybe the doctors got it right this time!

A video on the company's Web site tells us the device is cancer-free and emits no second-hand smoke. It actually looks like a fancy pen and part of the device contains a rechargeable battery. You just plug the device into the wall for three hours. The "fire" end is actually a cool-looking, high-tech glowing blue.

Flavored cartridges, which can contain a synthetic nicotine, cost roughly the price of a pack of cigarettes.

Besides explaining the product and stressing its safeness, the firm's Web site stresses getting people to sell the contraption.

I saw no price listed for this electronic cigarette but you can visit Conner's Web site at http://www.myinlife.com/bruceamour90 for more information.

It seems a bit contrived to me, but who knows? If it works, gets people off cigarettes and rewards entrepreneurs, maybe it is OK.

I got a lot of use out of my manual typewriter. It still sits in a closet in my house eons later, still useable but rarely used.

Will the same be said for the electronic cigarette?