Chewing gum is a sweetened and flavored insoluble plastic material used for chewing. It is one of the world’s most common habits. There are over 372 trillion sticks of gum made each year. People consume over 100,000 tons of gum a year. If we chew gum for 30 minutes then there is 187 billion hours of gum-chewing per year (Natural). The world’s oldest piece of gum is 9,000 years old (Facts).
Gum dates all the way back to the Ancient Greeks, but they weren’t the only ones chewing gum, there were the Mayans, North American Indians, and the early settlers. The Mayans made their gum from chicle. Chicle is milky latex from the sapodilla tree. Ancient Greeks chewed mastiche from a mastic tree. The North American Indians and Early settlers got their gum from the spruce tree. Most of their gum was made from tree sap and beeswax. In 1850 they made a gum from paraffin wax and this exceeded the spruce gum. (Hunter)
The first commercial gum was made and sold in 1848 by John B. Curtis. The first marketed chewing gum, named The State of Maine Pure Spruce Gum, was sold by John. Curtis was the first one to experiment with spruce tree resin. The Wrigley’s company was established in 1892 by William Wrigley Jr. The Wrigley most popular flavors such as Juicy Fruit and Double Mint were produce by William Wrigley Jr. (History).
Thomas Adams and his eldest son made their first batch of modern gum and named it Adams New York No. 1. He molded his gum in small gumballs wrapped in different colored paper. Thomas actually sold chewing gum out of a vending machine. He set the first vending machine in a New York City subway station. The vending machine sold both kinds of his gum such as Black Jack