There is evidence that people in northern Europe were consuming birch bark tar as early as 9,000 years ago. They might have done this for therapeutic reasons, such easing oral pain, in addition to having pleasure. The ancient Mayans in the Americas chewed chicle, a substance made from the sapodilla tree. According to researcher Jennifer P. Mathews, author of Chicle: The Chewing Gum of the Americas, utilised it to quench their thirst or hunger. Although they had rigorous societal regulations regarding it, the Aztecs also chewed chicle. Unmarried women and children could openly chew it. Married women and widows could only chew it in private to freshen their breath, while men were expected to chew it secretly, mainly to clean their teeth. But the question arises, how did chewing gum come to be? Here are your answers.
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A Brief History Of Chewing Gums
Native Americans in North America chewed the resin off spruce trees, and the European settlers who came after them carried on this custom. John Curtis created the first commercial spruce tree gum in the late 1840s by boiling the resin and then cutting it into strips and coating them with cornflour to keep them from sticking to one another. Curtis built the first chewing gum plant in history in Portland, Maine, around the early 1850s. In the end, spruce resin wasn't the best for making gum because it tasted bad and broke easily when chewed. Curtis and those who followed him into the gum industry later shifted to using paraffin wax and other chemicals.
The next significant event occurred when exiled Mexican President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna gave some chicle to Thomas Adams, an inventor in New York. It's unknown exactly how the two men got in touch, but they would have done so after Santa Anna arrived in the US sometime after the middle of the 1850s. In the hopes of regaining power in his native country, Santa Anna sought assistance in creating chicle as a rubber alternative. Adams started experimenting with chicle, but Santa Anna gave up on the concept after it didn't work. Adams then recognised that chicle might be utilised to create a superior chewing gum instead of being used for rubber. He later founded a business that sold gum all over the United States by the late 1880s. Chicle, which was imported from Mexico and Central America, continued to be the primary component of chewing gum until the mid-1900s, when synthetic materials generally supplanted it.
Chewing gum made William Wrigley Jr. one of America's wealthiest individuals in the 20th century. In his hometown of Philadelphia, Wrigley began his career as a soap salesman. He started giving store owners incentives to carry his goods after relocating to Chicago in 1891, like complimentary baking powder cans with every purchase. Wrigley substituted the baking powder for the soap after it turned out to be more popular, and as a bonus, they included complimentary packs of chewing gum. He threw himself into marketing, investing heavily in commercials and shrewd promotions. The Wrigley Company used phone book listings to literally send free gum to millions of Americans in 1915. They even ran a promotion where children received gum on their second birthday. Basically, long before social media, he was an expert at marketing buzz.
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From Chewing Gums To Bubble Gums
Particularly in the case of bubble gum, competition forced gum manufacturers to become more inventive. Having been in the chewing gum business since the 1880s, Frank Fleer spent years trying to create gum that could genuinely blow bubbles because he wanted something that his competitors didn't have. He invented Blibber-Blubber in 1906, but it was far too sticky to use. Walter Diemer, a Fleer employee, finally figured out the formula in 1928 and produced Dubble Bubble, the first commercially viable bubble gum. Gum comes in a range of flavours and shapes these days. Unfortunately, Willy Wonka's three-course dinner, which is chewing gum that is supposed to taste like blueberry pie, roast beef, and tomato soup, has not yet been made a reality.
How Is Chewing Gum & Bubble Gum Made?
The fundamental procedures involve combining the ingredients (more on those in a moment) in a device called a sigma mixer, which kneads the gum until it resembles bread dough. It is then rolled into sheets or tiny blocks, chilled, trimmed, and packed after being extruded from the mixer. Gum production is straightforward, but those ingredients are a different matter. The gum foundation itself is composed of three components: elastomers that preserve its elasticity, wax for softness, and a resin for chewiness. Originally composed of natural waxes and tree-based resins, chewing gums now contain both synthetic components manufactured from petrochemicals. That is to say, the gum you chew is basically made of rubber and plastic.
To improve the gum's consistency, natural and synthetic waxes—which serve as lubricants between polymer strands—are occasionally mixed together. Emulsifiers, which keep the gum soft; antioxidants, which keep it fresh; humectants, such as glycerol, which keep it wet; and natural and artificial flavours are possible additional gum constituents. Naturally, there are both artificial and natural sweeteners. The majority of gum was derived from sapodilla trees, which are found in the rainforests of southern Mexico and Central America, until about World War II.
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On their way down, workers called chicleros would scale them and make zigzag cuts in the bark. The trees would release a sort of Band-Aid, that chicle mentioned earlier, in reaction to the carving. The natural latex was collected in little pots as it ran down toward the base; after the pots were full, the chicle was dried, delivered by train through the forest. There are several exceptions, even though these artificial bases are used to make practically all chewing gum nowadays. Chicle-based gums are being reintroduced to consumers by several small-scale gum companies through sustainable procedures.