When is chewing gum invented

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". However, that gum was too sticky to enjoy, and never sold well. The very first chewing gum vending machine was located in one of the New York City subway stations. One day in , Mr.

Wrigley got the idea of offering two packages of chewing gum with each can of baking powder. This offer was a huge success! His first two brands were Lotta and Vassar. Juicy Fruit gum came next in , and Wrigley's Spearmint was introduced later that same year. Company really took off, but by the time he died in , Wrigley was one of the richest men in the nation.

The average American chewed sticks of gum a year by the s, creating a massive demand for chicle. As the fortunes of Adams, Wrigley and other chewing gum magnates surged, many Latin American communities would soon pay the price:. As is often the case, human appetites outmatched nature's resources.

Unsustainable harvesting methods used to increase yields killed at least a quarter of Mexico's sapodilla trees by the mids, and scientists predicted total forest depletion within four decades.

Fortunately for the trees but unfortunately for Latin American economies , chewing gum manufacturers soon began switching to cheaper, synthetic bases made from petroleum, wax and other substances. By , the United States was no longer importing any chicle from Mexico.

But chicle may be staging a small comeback. In Britain this year , a small Mexican company called Chicza just launched what it is marketing as "the world's first biodegradable chewing gum. If not, I expect to see it soon. While there were 12 other gum companies in the U. With the advent of new manufacturing technology, more and more gum hit American store shelves and innovations continued to flourish.

In , Walter Diemer, an accountant for Fleer Chewing Gum, accidentally created a batch of gum that was different than the rest, a recipe that became bubble gum. Fleer introduced the recipe to the world as Dubble Bubble and yes, we carry that, too. Now the world has sugarless gum, organic gum, all-natural gum, and bubble gum and chewing gum in a full spectrum of flavors and colors.

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.

One of Adams's most popular gums was Black Jack, which remained popular until the s, and which you can sometimes still find at retro candy stores today. He eventually added natural spearmint and tutti-frutti flavors. Adams's success generated many imitators. In , a New York pharmacist named Franklin V. One year later, a peppermint-flavored, candy-coated gum called Chiclets hit the shelves.

Of course, the most ubiquitous candy-coated gum is the gumballs we still see in vending machines in just about every grocery store in America. Legend has it that they were invented by a New York grocer who, dissatisfied with his sales of stick gum, wadded a bunch of it up and tossed it into a barrel of sugar. But, as with a lot of food origin stories, there's no solid documentation to back it up. That's not the case with bubble gum, which traces its origins back to , when a man by the name of Walter Diemer invented the stuff that bubble-blowing competitions and baseball card collections are made of.

Diemer was an employee of Frank Fleer, whose company started making chewing gum around