Chewing gum and bubble gum have changed drastically over the past 150 years. Every aspect of the wide selling product has been altered and improved to better suit the needs of its enormous number of consumers.
Chewing gum, made from the resin of the mastiche tree, was first introduced in ancient Greece. In North America, the first customers of gum were the Indians who chewed the sap from spruce trees. Next, the early American settlers designed a product made of spruce sap and beeswax that eventually had many men across America studying and perfecting the many different flavors and varieties of gum that we now have today.
John B. Curtis was the first person to ever produce and retail chewing gum in the United States. In 1848, he produced the State of Maine Pure Spruce Gum, which was sold throughout the country. Two years later, he began manufacturing flavored paraffin gums, which turned out to be more popular than his original product. .
In 1869, the first gum to ever ensue a patent was formulated by William Finley Semple. Just three years later, Thomas Adams patented a machine to manufacture large amounts of gum at one time. From this point on, bubble gum and chewing gum turned out to be a colossal success.
Over the next thirty years, the industry began to grow while inventors began producing a wide assortment of different flavors and varieties of chewing and bubble gums. Franklin V. Canning invented Dentyne gum in 1899. The first bubble gum invented in the United States was by Frank Fleer in 1906. Although the gum was never sold, this was the beginning of the chewy, pink gum seen all over the place today. Just eight years later, William Wrigley Jr marketed chewing gum with mint and fruit extracts.
Juicy Fruit and Spearmint were the first to flavors of Wrigley Company chewing gum to be sold. Mr. Wrigley can blame his huge success on his ideas to advertise his product in newspapers, magazines, and outdoor posters.
