Who was the inventer of GUM?

Question

Who was the inventer of GUM?

Answer 1

Fascinating facts about the invention of

Chewing Gum by Thomas Adams in 1870.

AT A GLANCE:

After he was defeated by the Americans in Texas, Mexican General Santa Anna was exiled to New York. Like many of his countrymen, Santa Anna chewed chicle. One day he introduced it to inventor Thomas Adams, who began experimenting with it as a substitute for rubber. Adams tried to make toys, masks, and rain boots out of chicle, but every experiment failed. Sitting in his workshop one day,tired and discouraged, he popped a piece of surplus stock into his mouth. In 1870, he opened the world’s first chewing gum factory making Adams New York No. 1.

Invention: chewing gum  



Function: noun / the first brand name was Adams New York No. 1

Definition: A sweetened and flavored preparation for chewing, usually made of chicle. Continusily manufactured since 1848, The first flavored gum was called Black Jack

Patent: Patent # 111,798 (US) issued February 14, 1871



Inventor: Thomas Adams Sr.



Criteria: First practical. Entrepreneur.

Birth: 1818

Death: 1905

  

Milestones:

1848 John Curtis made and sold the first commercial chewing gum called Maine Pure Spruce Gum.

1850,Curtis started selling flavored paraffin gums becoming more popular than spruce gums.

1869 Patent # 98,304 issued December 28 to William Finley Semple for rubber based chewing gum

1850 Mexican General Santa Anna introduces chicle to Thomas Adams

1870 Adams and his sons opened the first chewing gum factory making Adams New York No. 1.

1970 Patent # 107,883 issued September 27 to Weaton W. Kilbourn for a tobacco substitute gum.  

1871 Patent # 111,798 issued February 14 to Thomas Adams for a process to manufacture gum

1871 Adams created a licorice-flavored gum called Black Jack.. The first flavored gum

1880 John Colgan invented a way to make chewing gum taste better for a longer period of time

1888 Adams' chewing gum called Tutti-Frutti became the first chew to be sold in a vending machine

1891 Wrigley Chewing Gum founded by William Wrigley Jr..

1899 Adams and Sons merged with 6 other manufacturers and renamed the American Chicle Co.

1906 Frank Fleer invented the first bubble gum called Blibber-Blubber gum. However, was never sold.

1914 William Wrigley, Jr. and Henry Fleer create the Wrigley Doublemint brand

1928 Walter Diemer invents Double Bubble from the original Frank Fleer formula



Story:

People have enjoyed chewing gum-like substances in many lands and from very early times.  Some of these materials were thickened resin and latex from certain kinds of trees.  Others were various sweet grasses, leaves, grains and waxes.

For centuries the ancient Greeks chewed mastic gum (or mastiche pronounced "mas-tee-ka"). This is the resin obtained from the bark of the mastic tree, a shrub-like tree found on the island of Chios, Greece. Grecian women especially favored chewing mastic gum to clean their teeth and sweeten their breath.

From the Indians of New England, the American colonists learned to chew the gum-like resin that formed on spruce trees when the bark was cut. Lumps of spruce gum were sold in the eastern United States during the early 1800s, making it the first commercial chewing gum in this country. In about 1850, sweetened paraffin wax became popular and eventually exceeded spruce gum in popularity.

After he was defeated by the Americans in Texas, Mexican General Santa Anna was exiled to New York. Like many of his countrymen, Santa Anna chewed chicle.  One day he introduced it to inventor Thomas Adams, who began experimenting with it as a substitute for rubber. Adams tried to make toys, masks, and rain boots out of chicle, but every experiment failed.  

Sitting in his workshop one day,tired and discouraged, he popped a piece of surplus stock into his mouth.  Shortly, he opened the world’s first chewing gum factory making Adams New York No. 1..  



After success with pure chicle gum, Adams tried to add flavor to it. He created a licorice-flavored gum called Black Jack. It was the first gum to be sold as a stick not in chunks, and was popular with the public. The gum had one drawback; it could not hold flavor.

The flavor issue was not fixed until 1880. A man named William White experimented with flavors after receiving a shipment of chicle. He solved the problem by adding sugar and corn syrup to the mix. The first flavor he used was peppermint and it stayed in the gum during chewing.

Gum made with chicle and similar latexes soon won favor over spruce gum and paraffin gum. It made possible a smooth, springy, satisfying chew that the others lacked, and it held flavors longer and better. By the early 1900s, with improved methods of manufacturing, packaging and marketing, modern chewing gum was well on its way to its current popularity.

Answer 2

By the early 20th century, Americans could not get enough of the confection called chewing gum invented by Thomas Adams.

Answer 3

There are too many unsupported claims and errors made in citing the actual single inventor of Chewing Gum.

E.g.: "Thomas Adams (inventor) (1818-1905) inventor of chewing gum. Although he is credited with the invention of chewing gum, this is not an entirely accurate account. He did however come up with the idea of chicle gum and the creation of the chicle machine (chewing gum machine which produced sticks of gum made from chicle.) The "Adams Sons and Company" began producing gum in 1876."

***

"The Story of Chewing Gum

Recent research into the history of chewing gum indicates that the custom may not be as exclusively American as we have always thought it to be, although the U.S. does lead the world in total gum consumption.

For example, the ancient Greeks were known to be fond of a gummy substance named mastiche, derived from the resin of the mastic tree. In fact, Dioscorides, a Greek physician and medical botanist of the First Century, refers to the "curative powers" of the mastic in his writing.

Chewing was not a custom confined solely to ancient Greece, for today many Greeks and Middle Easterners enjoy chewing mastic resin, combined with beeswax, a softening agent. It may quite literally be said that mastiche is the "chew" of the Greeks, since the root "mastichan," in Greek means "to chew."

The Mayans were not too far behind the Greeks in developing the custom of chewing gum. Research shows that in about the Second Century, this large tribe of Central American Indians practiced the art of chewing what was later to be known as "chicle"- the coagulated sap of the Sapodilla tree.

Then, in about the year 800, the Mayan civilization met its end for reasons still largely unknown, virtually the only Mayan practice retained intact was that of chewing gum. The temples, the roads, the calendar, the great cities - all these were abandoned. But chewing gum remained. Its use continued among the descendants of the Mayans at least as late as the Nineteenth Century.

Meanwhile, the American Indians of New England were also chewing gum - but made from the resin of spruce trees. From the beginning in America, the custom of chewing gum grew, until during the early Nineteenth Century, the first gum products, lumps of spruce gum, were sold commercially.

Spruce gum continued to be sold, being replaced gradually by paraffin wax gum. Paraffin gum unfortunately required the heat and moisture of the mouth to render it suitable for chewing, and was therefore replaced as a base of all "regular" gums by other substances. Sweetened and flavored paraffin wax is still used in the production of novelty chewing products. Refined paraffin waxes are also used as ingredients of chewing gum bases.

Modern day gum products actually appeared in 1869, when the famous 'Mexican general, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, was searching for a substitute for rubber. He thought that perhaps chicle would fit the purpose. Santa Anna contacted American inventor Thomas Adams, who experimented with chicle but found it unsuitable as a rubber base.

One day, however, Adams noticed a girl chewing paraffin-based gum and remembered that General Santa Anna had, in the course of their meeting, chewed the very substance which he was trying to turn into rubber. The inventor, realizing that chicle was superior to all other gum bases then available, produced some chicle-based gum and persuaded a local druggist to carry it. This rediscovery of what the Mayans had known over one thousand years earlier revolutionized the manufacture of chewing gum.

Other trees also contribute or have contributed their latex to the chewing gum industry. Some of the latex used are leche, caspi and sorva, found in the Amazon Valley; nispero and tunu, from Central America; and jelutong, found in Indonesia, Malaya, and British Borneo.

Refined pine tree resins from our own Southeast coastal states also appear often as ingredients. Man-made resins and waxes have lately been used to greater degrees as the search continues for an even more enjoyable chew. Chicle, one of the early chewing products, is still produced commercially from the red and white Sapodilla trees which grow in the rain forests of Central and South America. These trees, concentrated most heavily in the Yucatan Peninsula, frequently reach heights of 100 feet or more, and develop with great hardness and density.The Sapodillas (Achras Sapota) are not tapped for their latex until they are at least 20 to 25 years old. Each tapping, made with a series of cross cuts, leading to a center channel - in the form of a herringbone - yields only 21/2 pounds of gum over a period of six hours. Trees are tapped only once in three or four years.

Although chicle and other natural gums are still utilized by the chewing gum industry, some, because of ever-increasing demand, are being extended by man-made materials. These have proven beneficial in providing the high consistency of chewing quality that the industry prides itself for.

Corn syrup, sugar, and flavoring agents are later added to the gum base in the gum-making process. These agents are of the highest quality, produced under spotless, rigidly controlled laboratory conditions.

How are the base, sugar, flavoring and synthetic materials combined to make the various kinds of chewing gums one buys at candy stores and other retail outlets? Most chewing gums are manufactured in the same manner up to a certain point. The gum base is melted in large, steam-jacketed kettles which heat it to about 240 degrees F. At this point it achieves the consistency of thick maple syrup. This "syrup" is then filtered through fine mesh screens, clarified in a centrifuge, and further filtered through very fine vacuum strainers. Throughout the process, the melted gum base is kept hot. The "mixers" now come into play. These are huge vats capable of holding up to 2,000 pounds each, and are equipped with slowly revolving blades. The first additions take place in these mixers. Powdered sugar, whose particle size has a definite effect on the brittleness or flexibility of the final product, is added. So is corn syrup, or glucose, which keeps the gum moist and pleasant to chew, and helps the sugar to combine easily with the gum base. Also softeners, which further retain moisture in the gum to insure a flexible, resilient chew; finally, either natural or artificial flavoring, whichever is desired, and to whatever taste, is added to the gum base in the huge mixing vats, as the giant blades slowly turn.

The blended gum then passes out of the mixers onto cooling belts and is bathed in currents of cool air to reduce its temperature. After this it moves to the extruders, machines which manipulate it to make it much smoother and finer in texture. From the extruders, the gum passes to a series of giant rollers which make up the "sheet-rolling machine." There, the gum is flattened into thinner and thinner sheets, the final thickness determined by the type of gum it is to be. Stick gum comes from the thinnest sheets; candy-coated gum, dating back to 1890, from a thicker sheet; and bubble or ball gum, from the thickest sheet of all. The stick gum passes into the cutting and scoring machines, where it is cut into smaller sheets, each scored in a single-stick pattern. The gum destined for candy coating is scored into little square or oblong pellets, and broken up by machine. For ball gum, the gum is scored or extruded into a pencil shape, and then run through specialized forming machines to form a ball shape.

The machines shaping and wrapping bubble gum, first sold in 1906, may be set for any one of a variety of shapes: stick, candy-coated, ball, pencil, kiss, or square. When scored stick gum emerges from the rollers, it has also been sprinkled with pure powered sugar. The gum is then put aside to "set'' in an air-conditioned room for at least 48 hours. The candy-coated gum is, after a 24-to-48 hour storage period, sometimes undercoated to help the coating adhere more firmly, then coated with candy in this case, pure, liquid sugar. The gum is then placed into pans where it is whirled with beeswax or another wax product. This process provides candy-coated chewing gum with its characteristic sheen. Chewing gum comes in an enormous variety of packages. Among them are the multiple-stick packs, the box-type of pack for candy-coated pellet gum, individually wrapped pieces of bubble gum, and the glass vending machines in which ball gum is revealed, unwrapped. The important thing about packaging is that it takes place under immaculate conditions as does the rest of the manufacturing process, so that the product reaches the consumer with all of its quality and purity fully protected.

For many years the custom of chewing gum has not only continued, but expanded among the populations of the world. This is probably because the chewing of gum is fun. It tastes good and continuously releases its pleasant flavor sensation over a long period of time with the total ingestion of only approximately 5 to 10 calories per portion.

The chewing gum industry guards the purity and integrity of its products and annually invests a substantial share of its income in the thorough investigation of every ingredient and aspect of manufacture, as well as in research and development. These manufacturers want their customers to continue enjoying one of the finest food products in the world." ****

"Timeline

By the early 20th century, Americans could not get enough of the confection called chewing gum invented by Thomas Adams.

Timeline

The ancient Greeks chewed mastiche - a chewing gum made from the resin of the mastic tree.

The ancient Mayans chewed chicle which is the sap from the sapodilla tree.

North American Indians chewed the sap from spruce trees and passed the  

Answer 4

W.F. Semple of Mount Vernon, Ohio, patented chewing gum in 1869.

However, humans have been chewing various gums, resins and latex secretions of plants for thousands of years. Mastic gum has been chewed by Mediterranean peoples for thousands of years, and Native Americans chewed the resin from spruce trees.

The first commercial chewing gum, State of Maine Spruce Gum was introduced in 1850. Made using spruce tree resin, it had a harsh taste and tough texture. In 1871 Thomas Adams patented chicle gum, with sugar and sassafras flavoring. It had the right chewing properties with no harsh taste or texture, and it caught on quickly with the American public. This was soon followed (by other companies) with peppermint flavored gum in 1885, Chiclets (gum with a hard sugar coating in 1900, Juicy Fruit and Spearmint flavors in 1893, and finally bubble gum in 1928.

The country with the largest number of chewing gum manufacturers is Turkey, with more then 60 companies manufacturing chewing gum! The popularity of chewing gum was both helped by, and helped spawn the development of the vending machine. The first vending machines were used to sell chewing gum in the New York Subways.