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Nicotine is named after the tobacco plant Nicotiana tabacum. This plant is named after Jean Nicot de Villemain, French ambassador in Portugal, who sent tobacco and seeds from Brazil to Paris in 1560 and promoted their medicinal use.
History of nicotine started in 1828 when Wilhelm Posselt and Karl Reimann managed to isolate nicotine from tobacco plant. In 1843 Melsens explains its experimental chemical formula and A. Pictet and Crepieux did the first synthesis in 1893.
They discovered that nicotine was a potent and powerful chemical that could be absorbed through the skin, which made it an effective pesticide that is still used around the world.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, lung cancer was a rare medical disease. The “cigarette,” a new product, was becoming popular, while in England, Professor John N. Langley of Cambridge University was exploring the effects of nicotine.
It was known that nicotine could be absorbed through the skin, causing sickness in humans. But Langley also discovered that a miniscule drop of nicotine stimulated muscle fibers while a similar amount of another poison, curare, paralyzed them when administered simultaneously to anesthetized birds. Langley correctly concluded that muscles and nerves must contain what he termed “receptive substances” (now called “receptors”).
In response to different chemicals, these receptors were either activated or deactivated. Drugs that activate receptors are called “agonists.” For example, the deadly poison, curare, exerted its lethal paralysis of muscles, including those working the lungs, by blocking nicotinic receptors.
But the right dose of nicotine could reactivate muscles depressed by curare. Nicotine was one of a particularly interesting type of chemicals in which a small amount could produce activation while a larger dose could produce deactivation.
These discoveries helped to explain how muscles could be stimulated or relaxed by the same nerve. By the end of the twentieth century, a long history of scientific research of nicotine had transformed our understanding of nicotine from being an obscure poison to being an addicting drug responsible for taking millions of tobacco smokers to premature death.
Nicotine is unique in comparison to most drugs, as its profile changes from stimulant to sedative/pain killer in increasing dosages and use.
And now in spite of long history nicotine research there isn’t whole understanding.
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History of smoking 
