A history of… chewing gum

Aztec women chewed it "in order not to be detested"

When I decided to research the history of chewing gum I was a bit worried that there wouldn’t be much of interest to find. After all, I reasoned, it was probably invented in America in the 19th century and there simply wouldn’t be very much history. It turned out that, as was the case with drinking straws, I was totally, utterly wrong. The history of chewing gum is both very ancient and totally fascinating!

The earliest known piece of chewing gum – complete with teeth marks – was unearthed in Kierikki, Finland, in 2007 and is around 5,000 years old. The gum in question is birch bark tar that contains phenols which are natural antiseptics, so it seems likely that it was chewed to keep the mouth and teeth healthy and it probably tasted pretty good as well. The Scandinavians were not the only ones to be chewing gum far back in history. In a form of convergent evolution, peoples all around the world found gum (or gum-like) substances to munch on. 

Mastic is a tree resin from the Mediterranean that has been chewed for at least 2,500 years. The centre of production, both historically and to this day, is the island of Chios in the northern Aegean Sea, which is why another name for the resin is The tears of Chios. To produce the gum, cuts are made in the bark of the trees and the resin exudes, forming droplets, which eventually harden and fall to the ground as ‘tears’. The chewing of mastic was widespread in Ancient Greece not only as a breath-freshener and oral hygiene promoter, but also for general health benefits. Hippocrates said that its consumption was proof against digestive ailments and colds, and it turns out that he wasn’t wrong. Modern scientific studies have shown it can both reduce irritable bowel syndrome and lower cholesterol.

Mastic was particularly prized by the Byzantines: it was said to be worth more than its weight in gold, and stealing it was punishable by death. In order to protect their valuable commodity, the Mastichochoria (the 24 ‘mastic villages’ that controlled its production) were heavily fortified, with high walls that had no doors at street level – entry was only via ladders to make them more easily defendable. When the Ottomans massacred the population of Chios in 1822 during the Greek War of Independence, only the residents of the Mastichochoria escaped death or slavery because the sultan wanted to maintain the supply of mastic to his harem!

Over in Central America native peoples had been tapping the trunks of Maikara trees and boiling up the gum to make chicle for thousands of years (the word chicle comes from the Nahuatl word for the gum, tzictli [ˈt͡sikt͡ɬi], which can be translated as ‘sticky stuff’, and to this day chicle is a common term for chewing gum in Spanish).

The Spanish were very enamoured of chicle when they first encountered it – it tasted delicious, had a high sugar content and helped keep hunger pangs at bay. Interestingly, the Aztecs had very specific rules both about who could chew gum and where they could chew it, as the 16th-century Spanish friar Bernardino de Sahagún recorded in his Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España (General History of the Things of New Spain). For example, if you were a young and/or unmarried woman it was perfectly acceptable to publicly chew gum:

And the chewing of chicle is the preference, the privilege of little girls, the small girls, the young women. Also the mature women, the unmarried women use it; and all the women who are unmarried chew chicle in public.

Unmarried or not, if you were not a young woman, chewing gum in public could lead people to make judgements about your character:

But the bad women, those called harlots show no fine feeling quite publicly they go about chewing chicle along the roads, in the marketplace, clacking like castanets.

It was acceptable for married women to chew chicle, but this had to be done in private:

One’s wife also chews chicle, but not in public… the women chew chicle because therefore they cause their saliva to flow and thereby their mouths are scented; the mouth is given a pleasing taste. With it they dispel the bad odour of their mouths, or the bad smell of their teeth. Thus they chew chicle in order not to be detested.

But what of Aztec men? Were they denied the oral hygiene benefits of chewing chicle? No, but given that the practice was so strongly associated with women they had to be very careful about doing it lest they wanted their sexuality to be questioned:

The men also chew chicle to cause their saliva to flow and to clean the teeth, but this is very secretly – never in public. The chewing of chicle is common practice of the addicts termed ‘effeminate’… and men who publicly chew chicle achieve the status of sodomites.

Native Americans had been similarly chewing gum for millennia, but their product of choice was the sap of spruce trees. Once again the Europeans were very taken with the stuff when they tried it, and in the 1850s John Curtis turned it into a commercial product – State of Maine Pure Spruce Gum. After a slow start this became a very successful business for him, producing 1,800 boxes of gum a day and employing more than 200 people. The popularity of this product was soon surpassed, however, by an artificial alternative: paraffin wax. This had the advantage of being cheap and easy to produce at scale, but it lacked inherent flavour, so consumers tended to pop it out of their mouths and dip it into powdered sugar at regular intervals as they chewed (which was doubtless not great for their teeth!).

William Semple, a dentist from Ohio, thought he could do better (perhaps fed up with dealing with so many sugar-damaged teeth) and in 1869 patented a chewing gum based upon rubber which, crucially, was not sweetened, but could be flavoured:

Letters Patent No. 98,304, dated December 28,1869.

IMPROVED CHEWING-GUM

To all whom it may concern, be it known that I, WILLIAM F. SEMPLE, of Mount Vernon, county of Knox, and state of Ohio, have invented a new and improved Chewing-Gum; and I do hereby declare that the following is a full, clear, and exact description of the same.

The nature of my invention consists in compounding with rubber, in any proportions, other suitable substances, so as to form not only an agreeable chewing-gum, but also, that from the scouring-properties of the same, it will subserve the purpose of a dentifrice.

It is well known that rubber itself is too hard to be used as a chewing-gum, but in combination with nonadhesive earths may be rendered capable of kneading into any shape under the teeth. In the manufacture of this improved chewing-gum, no vulcanizing-process is employed. It is produced by simply dissolving the rubber in naphtha and alcohol, and when of the consistence of jelly, mixing with it prepared chalk, powdered licorice-root, or any other suitable material, in the desired proportions, and subsequently evaporating the solvents.

It doesn’t sound like the loveliest thing to put in one’s mouth and it never really took off, because a natural alternative burst onto the US scene around the same time, our old friend, chicle. Antonio López de Santa Anna,¹ the former President of Mexico, gave some chicle to an American inventor Thomas Adams. The aim was to see if it could be synthesised into rubber and then be made into tyres but Adams couldn’t figure out how to vulcanise it properly. He did however notice that Santa Anna and his friends like to chew the stuff and that made him wonder if he could get in on the chewing gum boom. In true home inventor fashion he boiled up his first batch of gum in his kitchen and persuaded a local store to stock it. It soon sold out and he moved into mass production. He patented the first chewing gum manufacturing machine in 1871 and began selling gum via vending machines in 1888. In 1884 he created a gum flavoured with liquorice called Black Jack which can still be bought 140 years later. The company that he founded operates to this day (though is now known as Cadbury Adams, having been acquired by Cadbury’s for a cool $4.1 billion in 2002). 

Probably the most famous name in gum, Wrigley’s, was a little late to the party, being founded in 1891 by William Wrigley Jr.. He initially made the gum as a sales tool for his baking powder business – for every tin of powder purchased the customer would get two free sticks of gum. He soon realised that gum was the winner and dropped the baking powder to focus on it. Interestingly he had got into the baking powder business because he was giving that away as an incentive to buy soap!

In 1893 Wrigley introduced his most iconic product, Juicy Fruit, a brand name recognised by 99 per cent of Americans. Have you ever wondered exactly what fruit flavour Juicy Fruit actually is? Well, you are not alone, but the truth is a closely guarded trade secret. It is probably flavoured with the chemical isoamyl acetate (sometimes known as banana oil), a carboxylic ester which is also found in jackfruit. Delicious.

Chicle continued to be used in chewing gum beyond the Second World War, but the demand for gum then began to outstrip the supply of this natural resource, so by the 1960s most gum was being made from a synthetic rubber. You can, however, find a couple of brands today, such as Tree Hugger Gum, who make their gum from natural chicle.

Growing up in the 1970s a common classroom claim was that swallowing chewing gum would kill you – normally backed up by an urban legend about some poor kid who continually swallowed their gum, only to die and a huge bolus of the stuff being found in their stomach during the autopsy. It is okay, but not advisable, to swallow the odd piece of gum, but it turns out those childish tales are perhaps not so legendary after all. Here is the tragic tale of a young girl who died in 1897 of peritonitis after swallowing gum:

Though it couldn’t be directly blamed for the death, both the jury and the coroner formed very strong views about gum:

[the jury] returned a verdict that the death was due to peritonitis, of which they were unable to say the cause. At the same time the Foreman suggested that they would like to say that, in their opinion, the sale of chewing gum should be strictly prohibited, and shopkeepers asked to refrain from selling it.

The Coroner quite agreed. It seemed absurd to him that a sweetmeat should be sold to children and labelled “Not to be eaten”.

Suffice to say no such prohibition came to pass, and today the world chews through an astonishing 375 billion pieces of gum each year!

1. Or to give him his full name, Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón, which is a bit of a mouthful.