When was gum first created

In the 20th century, chewing gum made William Wrigley Jr. Wrigley started out as a soap salesman in his native Philadelphia. After moving to Chicago in , 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 , 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.

Competition also played a role in the development of bubble gum. And bubble gum was here to stay! Frank Fleer invented a gum recipe in , but was shelved because it broke apart too easily and was too sticky.

So why pink? The fact is that when Walter Diemer was coming up with a new type of gum, pink food colouring was the only colour available. So pink it was! Now pink bubble gum is the most common colour around.

A child blows a very large bubble. Photo courtesy of Pixabay. If you want to blow the ultimate bubble, take it slow. This allows the bubble gum to stretch and grow. Of course, it takes a lot of practice to become a bubble-blowing champ. It tasted okay, but my mother, practically dry-heaving each time she opened the freezer, eventually put the kibosh on this practice. According to Mestres, the main problem with flavor loss isn't the gum itself but our own mouths. Part of the reason gum loses flavor, he says, is that the receptors on our tongues become saturated to the point that, after a while, we simply don't taste it anymore.

He claims that if we remove the gum we're chewing for a few minutes, take a sip of water to clear our palate, and start chewing the gum again, we'll find it has more flavor than we previously detected. Still, over time anywhere from two to five minutes, based on my own unscientific research , our saliva absorbs both the flavoring and the sweeteners, leaving us with a flavorless wad that, unless you're a certain White House press secretary , eventually gets discarded.

Until recently, I assumed the gum I chewed was at least kind of natural. Sure, I suspected it contained a 21st-century combo of artificial colors, preservatives, sweeteners, flavors, much like the one just described. But I mistakenly thought the base itself was derived from a naturally occurring something-or-other.

For years, that was true. Until around World War II, most gum came from the sapodilla trees that grow in the rain forests of southern Mexico and Central America. Workers known as chicleros would scale them and cut zigzag patterns into the bark on their way down.

In response to the shivving, the trees would secrete a Band-Aid of sorts—that chicle I mentioned above. The connection between her field and the name of the book is simple: The Mayans loved chewing chicle. They started gnawing on it as early as the year , to freshen their breath or work the maize out of their teeth. But they weren't the first to fall in love with chewy saps and resins. Mastic, a resinous substance produced by a tree native to southern Europe, was chewed by the ancient Greeks; the Scandinavians chewed birch sap; native North Americans gnawed on the sap of the spruce tree.

But the Mayans' love of gum was different—something akin to a present-day American's love of cheeseburgers, or a German's love of beer.

Later, the Aztecs would also take up the practice of chewing chicle, though they were far more rigid than the Mayans about who could chew it. Anyone of adult age who chewed it was considered totally vulgar. In the United States, European settlers picked up the habit of chewing spruce from Native Americans as far back as the s. But it wasn't until that a New Englander named John B. Curtis started selling it commercially.

His Maine Pure Spruce Gum, and its natural spruce taste, became enormously popular. He eventually started making gum with paraffin wax, instead of difficult-to-source sap, and flavoring it with ingredients like sugar, licorice, and vanilla.

Curtis maintained a monopoly on the gum industry for decades, until a man by the name of Thomas Adams entered the picture. Determined to return to power once more, the general tapped Adams, who was assigned to him as a secretary, to help him in his efforts to vulcanize chicle, with the goal of making a rubber substitute that could compete with the likes of Goodyear.

If he could pull it off, the fallen general hoped the profits would help finance an army, allowing him to win back the presidency. It didn't work. After much trial and error, Santa Anna gave up on the idea and went back to Mexico, where he did eventually return to power. But Adams, who'd picked up the general's habit of chewing chicle, decided to take a different stab at glory.

Working out of his kitchen, he boiled the chicle down, dried it, rolled it, cut it into sticks, and took it to a local drugstore where customers, mostly children, often purchased Curtis's wax gum. It sold out within hours. By , Adams had patented a machine for making chewing gum sticks. By the s, according to Mathews, he was selling five tons of gum per day. That was the first step for creating world's first modern chewing gum! In Thomas Adams patented a machine for the manufacture of gum.

That year Adams created a licorice-flavored gum called Black Jack. However, all the these gums had one big problem, they could not hold flavor. Problem with holding flavor was not fixed until , when William White combined sugar and corn syrup with chicle.

For better taste he added peppermint extract. He found out, that peppermint stayed in the gum during chewing for much longer than other flavors. He called his first pepperming flavored gum Yucatan gum. That was the next big discovery in the world of chewing gums. This type of gum is still available today.

Also, in , Henry Fleer and Frank Fleer experimented with chicle from sapodilla tree. Fleer brothers made cubes of the chicle substance and overlayed the cubes with sweet material. They called their invention "Chiclets".