Search results
The Mayans and Aztecs were the first to unlock the positive properties of gum. Amanda Fiegl. June 16, 2009. Chewing gum has been around for centuries. Flickr user Mr.iMaax. Gum is one of those ...
- Amanda Fiegl
Amanda Fiegl was a former assistant editor at Smithsonian.
- Amanda Fiegl
Modern-day chewing gum: John B. Curtis created the first commercial chewing gum in Maine, USA, in 1845. He named the brand “The State of Maine Pure Spruce Gum.” Though slow to start. It eventually became a huge hit. First patent: Years later, in 1869, the first chewing gum patent was filed by a local dentist, William F. Semple.
- Overview
- Wrigley and Fleer Brought Chewing Gum to Millions
- The Food That Built America
People have been chewing gum, in various forms, since ancient times.
While colorful packs of chewing gum may seem like something dreamed up by a modern-day, real-life Willy Wonka, chewing gum has been used, in various forms, since ancient times.
There’s evidence that some northern Europeans were chewing birch bark tar 9,000 years ago—possibly for enjoyment as well as medicinal purposes, such as relieving toothaches. In the Americas, the ancient Mayan people chewed a substance called chicle, derived from the sapodilla tree, as a way to quench thirst or fight hunger, according to anthropologist Jennifer P. Mathews, author of Chicle: The Chewing Gum of the Americas. The Aztecs also used chicle and even had rules about its social acceptability. Only kids and single women were allowed to chew it in public, notes Mathews. Married women and widows could chew it privately to freshen their breath, while men could chew it in secret to clean their teeth.
How an Exile Brought Chewing Gum to America
In North America, indigenous people chewed spruce tree resin, a practice that continued with the European settlers who followed. In the late 1840s, John Curtis developed the first commercial spruce tree gum by boiling resin, then cutting it into strips that were coated in cornstarch to prevent them from sticking together. By the early 1850s, Curtis had constructed the world’s first chewing gum factory, in Portland, Maine.
As it turned out, spruce resin proved to be less-than-ideal for producing gum: It didn’t taste great and became brittle when chewed. Curtis and others who’d jumped into the gum business after him subsequently switched to ingredients such as paraffin wax.
In the 20th century, chewing gum made William Wrigley Jr. one of the wealthiest men in America. Wrigley started out as a soap salesman in his native Philadelphia. After moving to Chicago in 1891, he began offering store owners incentives to stock his products, such as free cans of baking powder with every order. When the baking powder proved a bigger hit than the soap, Wrigley sold that instead and added in free packs of chewing gum as a promotion.
In 1893, he launched two new gum brands, Juicy Fruit and Wrigley’s Spearmint. Because the chewing gum field had grown crowded with competitors, Wrigley decided he’d make his products stand out by spending heavily on advertising and direct marketing. In 1915, the Wrigley Company kicked off a campaign in which it sent free samples of its gum to millions of Americans listed in phone books. Another promotion entailed sending sticks of gum to U.S. children on their second birthday.
The competition also played a role in the development of bubble gum. Frank Fleer, whose company had made chewing gum since around 1885, wanted something different from his rivals and spent years working on a product that could be blown into bubbles. In 1906, he concocted a bubble gum he called Blibber-Blubber, but it proved to be too sticky. In 1928, a Fleer employee named Walter Diemer finally devised a successful formula for the first commercial bubble gum, dubbed Dubble Bubble.
Today, gum is sold in a variety of shapes and flavors. Although sadly, Willy Wonka’s three-course dinner chewing gum—said to taste like tomato soup, roast beef and blueberry pie—has yet to become reality.
Watch every season of the hit show The Food That Built America. Available to stream now.
Watch now
Updated on June 09, 2019. Thomas Adams (May 4, 1818–February 7, 1905) was an American inventor. In 1871, he patented a machine that could mass produce chewing gum from chicle. Adams later worked with businessman William Wrigley, Jr. to establish the American Chicle Company, which experienced great success in the chewing gum industry.
Oct 18, 2024 · chewing gum, sweetened product made from chicle and similar resilient substances and chewed for its flavour. Peoples of the Mediterranean have since antiquity chewed the sweet resin of the mastic tree (so named after the custom) as a tooth cleanser and breath freshener. New England colonists borrowed from the Indians the custom of chewing ...
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Mar 8, 2024 · The developer, John Curtis, even launched America's first chewing gum factory in Maine. But the taste and texture of resin failed to gain popularity, leading to a paraffin-wax stint, and an ...
People also ask
Who invented chewing gum?
Where did chewing gum come from?
How did chewing gum become popular after WW2?
What is chewing gum?
What is chewing gum made of?
How is bubble gum made?
Nov 14, 2023 · The practice of chewing gum dates back thousands of years, its enduring popularity evident in the dried chicle (a natural gum derived from trees) found among Mayan ruins in southern Mexico and the thousands of grayscale ovals pressed into city sidewalks around the world. But why we chew gum is a matter of conjecture.
