The Mayans cooked and dried it into "cha," which Mathews says "quenched thirst and staved off hunger," and the Aztecs recognized chicle's function as a breath-freshener.
Interestingly, however, the Aztecs seemed to view public gum chewing as socially unacceptable for adults, especially men. Of course, as Mathews notes, the Mayans and Aztecs weren't the earliest cultures in the world to chew gum.
Pliny the Elder wrote about a plant-derived substance called mastich chewed or masticated, as it were by the ancient Greeks, and archaeological evidence suggests that chewing birch-bark tar was popular with Scandinavian young people thousands of years ago.
Northern Native American cultures chewed spruce tree resin, and European settlers picked up the habit and capitalized on it. But none of those things are the ubiquitous chewing gum we know today. That goes back to chicle again, and an American inventor named Thomas Adams Sr. Adams and his sons first tried to vulcanize the chicle into a useful industrial substance, like rubber, but eventually hit on a better idea—boiling and hand-rolling it into pieces of chewing gum.
They produced five tons of chewing gum daily. Around the same time, a young soap salesman named William Wrigley came up with a smart marketing gimmick: His company would give free chewing gum to vendors who placed large soap orders.
Did you think of gum? The ancient Greeks chewed on tree resin, as did the Mayans and Native Americans. Archaeologists have found tree resin with teeth marks in it from places like Finland and Sweden, dating back more than 5, years.
Native Americans showed the early settlers their chewing gum secrets, and the Curtis family in Maine harvested the resin from spruce trees and began selling bits of it for a penny each in William Semple, a dentist from Ohio, got a patent for his chewing gum formula in , which was a mix of rubber, sugar, licorice, and charcoal.
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 A consummate capitalist, Fleer wanted to sell something different from his rivals and spent years working on a product that could be blown into bubbles.
In , he concocted a bubble gum he called Blibber-Blubber, but it proved too sticky to market. After much fiddling with Fleer's recipe, in Diemer struck gold with a bubble gum that's still sold from candy jars all over the world: Dubble Bubble. William Wrigley, the most famous man in the gum biz aside from Adams, entered it pretty late in the game. While he started selling his gum in the s, it wasn't until the early s that he began to change the industry forever.
He put up billboards everywhere, and in , he sent four sticks of gum to everyone listed in the US phone book—that's 1.
The success of Wrigley's and Adams's chicle-based chewing gum started taking its toll on those Central American forests, which weren't ideal producers for massive human consumption. According to Milton, sapodilla trees can be harvested only once they are around 20 years old, and each yields only about a kilogram of gum per tapping, which occur every three or four years.
A Smithsonian article, drawing on Mathews's research, noted that poor harvesting methods resulted in the loss of approximately a quarter of the sapodilla trees in Mexico by the s. Faced with a shortage of chicle, chewing gum manufacturers started switching to synthetic, petroleum-derived bases, essentially introducing Americans to the modern-day gums we chew today.
Variations in our microbiome may impact everything from susceptibility to infection and heart disease to even possibly behavior. Birch pitch also called tar , a glue-like substance made by heating birch bark , has been used to fasten stone blades to handles in Europe since at least the Middle Pleistocene approximately , to , years ago.
Blobs of pitch imprinted with human teeth marks have been found at ancient toolmaking sites, where archaeologists surmise the pitch was chewed to soften before use. Due to the antiseptic nature of birch bark, it may have also had medicinal properties. Chewed pitch is sometimes the only indicator of a human presence at sites where physical remains are not found, and archaeologists have long suspected that the otherwise unremarkable wads may be a source of ancient DNA. Earlier this year, nearly complete human genomes were sequenced from 10,year-old chewed birch pitch originally excavated 30 years ago at the site of Huseby Klev in Sweden.
Archaeologists at Syltholm have found evidence for tool making and animal butchery at the site, but no human remains. The pitch was radiocarbon dated to around 5, years ago, the advent of the Neolithic period in Denmark. This was a time when practices of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were being disrupted by the introduction of agriculture from areas to the south and east.
See this 7,year-old woman who was among Sweden's last hunter-gatherers. Her genome also reveals that she was lactose intolerant, which supports the theory that European populations developed the ability to digest lactose as they began to consume milk product from domesticated animals. Some, however, are associated with severe periodontal disease.
Researchers were also able to identify the DNA of mallard ducks and hazelnuts from the chewed pitch, suggesting that the foodstuffs had been recently consumed by Lola.
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