"Chewing gum! A new and superior preparation of Spruce Gum."
Chicago Daily Democrat, October 25, 1850
Chewing gum is widely regarded as an American phenomenon, but the practice of chewing a form of gum actually dates back to prehistory and Europe. Thousands of years later the ancient Greeks were chewing mastiche, a resin from the mastic tree, and the ancient Mayans were chewing chicle, a rubbery sap from the sapodilla tree. Native Americans chewed a gum made from the resin of spruce trees, and it was from this that-the American John Curtis invented his chewing gum. In 1848 he sold his "spruce gum" commercially, which started a fashion for the chewy substance. Gradually spruce gum was replaced by gum made from paraffin wax, which was then sweetened and sold by Curtis around 1848.
Modern chewing gum came into being rather by accident. The Mexican general Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna was searching for an alternative to rubber for manufacturing purposes and contacted the American inventor Thomas Adams to see if he could use chicle as a substitute. Adams experimented with the chicle to no avail, bur subsequently he turned his attention to creating a sweetened and flavored chewing gum. Around the same time, William J. White experimented with adding corn syrup, sugar, and peppermint to gum, creating one of the most popular gum flavors. In 1891 William Wrigley Jr. founded his chewing gum enterprise, and today Wrigley's is the largest chewing- gum manufacturer in the United States.
Although chicle and other natural products are still sometimes used in the chewing-gum industry, man- made gum bases are more commonly used to keep up with the enormous demand.
