Who Invented Chewing Gum

An article by Peter Pierce    Comments Off

Before the invention of the chewing gum, people enjoyed many substances that resembled chewing gum. Few materials like latex from trees, thick resin, sweet grasses, grains, etc resembled the gum. Mastic gum, a kind of resin taken from the bark of mastic tree was used by ancient Greeks for chewing. The mastic tree was a shrub like tree developed on the Chios Island, Greece. Flavoured mastic chewing gums were used by Grecian women for cleaning their teeth and sweetening their breath.

Chewing gum was invented by Thomas Adams in the year 1870 and he received the patent rights for the same in 1871. It is sweet flavoured preparation for chewing being made from Chicle. He opened the first chewing gum factory in the New York in a short period after his invention.

After his invention got approved, Adams tried to add flavour to the gum. The world’s first flavoured chewing gum in liquorice flavour was called Black Jack. It was very popular among the people, but the main drawback was that it could not hold the flavour for a long time. In 1880, John Colgan invented the perfect way to make chewing gum taste good even when chewed for long.

The flavour was not fixed to the gum until 1880. In the early 1881, William White experimented with the addition of flavours to the gum and he succeeded the same by corn syrup and adding sugar. The first flavour introduced by him was peppermint.