Chewing Gum History

Monday 16 January 2012 @ 1:15 pm

In 1848, John B. Curtis made and sold State of Maine Pure Spruce Gum, the first commercial chewing gum. By 1850 he was selling flavored paraffin gums, which grew in popularity surpassing the spruce gum. Almost 142 years ago, this month (1869), the first chewing gum patent, U.S. Patent # 98304 was issued to William Finley Semple. Adding sugar to petroleum-derived paraffin made it sweeter, but they were not sufficiently chewy and so the manufacturers turned to the chewy stuff, tree sap, again.

The same year, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna of Alamo fame introduced chicle to Thomas Adams and the two worked together to see whether it could be a substitute for the other tree sap that was a real money earner – Rubber. It was not. Instead, in 1871 Thomas Adams patented a machine to manufacture gum. If you cannot ride on it, chew it.

By 1880 John Colgan has found a way to make chewing gum stay tasty for longer. In 1888 Thomas Adam’s Tutti-Frutti was being sold in a vending machine located in a New York City subway station. Ten years later, in 1899, New York druggist Franklin V.Canning created Dentyne gum.

Bubble gum was invented in 1906 by Frank Fleer, who called it Blibber-Blubber gum, but it did not make its way to market until a Frank H. Fleer Company employee, Walter Diemer improved the recipe and created the ubiquitously pink Double Bubble gum. The Wrigley Doublemint brand was born in 1914. Henry Fleer and William Wrigley are credited for adding both mint and fruit flavors to chicle chewing gum. Now they come in all colors.

Now you have chewing gums, and varieties with no sugar or artificial flavors, with spices added to make way for better oral health. Chewing gum, whichever kind, is good for you because it increases saliva flow and helps clear the mouth of food debris, effectively starving the mouth bacteria of nutrition.

Happy chewing!

You can read about the history of toothpaste and tooth brushes in past installments of the FreeDentistFinder.com/blog.

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