Free How the Hot Dog Found Its Bun by Josh Chetwynd Page A

be the equivalent of chewing on a rubber tire, there’s a reason for that. Americans can attribute the invention of the jaw chomping diversion to a man who initially thought gum would be great as a rubber substitute.
    The basis for the first chewing gum was a substance known as chicle. A milky sap taken from the Mexican sapodilla tree, the substance made its way to the United States in a most unexpected way from a famously dubious character.
    Antonio López de Santa Anna is best known as the Mexican general and politician responsible for the massacre at the Alamo. With Texas settlers trying to secede from Mexico, Santa Anna commanded his army to lay siege to the Alamo, ultimately slaughtering those defending the fort, including such notables as Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett. The Texans would eventually prevail against Santa Anna. While many of the Mexican leaders involved were executed for their part, Santa Anna was allowed to immigrate to America where he moved to Staten Island in New York (now that’s a change of scenery!).
    Not long after settling in, Santa Anna met an inventor named Thomas Adams, who observed how the former Mexican power broker liked to chew on these small pieces of chicle. Adams didn’t really see the value in that. In the United States at the time, paraffin wax was the chew of choice. Instead, Adams sent away for a crate of chicle with a different goal in mind. He thought that with the right combination of chemicals Santa Anna’s gummy substance could be transformed into a synthetic rubber. Adams failed in that endeavor, but between the former dictator’s chewing and Adams’ own son Horatio supposedly picking up the habit, he relented and began marketing his supply of chicle in 1871 as unwrapped balls. He called his creation “Adams New York Gum—Snapping and Stretching.”
    Chicle-based chewing gum became established by the start of the twentieth century, but it stretched to another level in 1928 when an unlikely source mistakenly created bubble gum. That individual was Walter Diemer and he wasn’t an inventor like Thomas Adams or even a scientist. He was an accountant. Nevertheless he was an accountant at the right place for this sort of creation. He worked at the Fleer Chewing Gum Corporation and after being asked one day to keep an eye on some gum manufacturing while a colleague had to answer the phone, he became intrigued by the business. He developed such an interest that during down time he’d mess around with some of the product. This odd decision by the accountant shouldn’t be too much of a surprise as Diemer was somewhat eccentric. Late in life he was known to ride around Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on a large-scale tricycle.
    With no formal background, Diemer threw all sorts of things in his batches of gum. The company had previously made gum supple enough to blow bubbles, but the problem was the chewy substance would either be too sticky or would break apart. The cliché goes if you put a thousand monkeys in a room with typewriters and give them enough time they’ll produce the great American novel. It seems that it only took one accountant and a handful of months to produce just the right bubble blowing consistency. His secret: latex. “It was an accident,” Diemer told the Lancaster (Pennsylvania) Intelligencer Journal in 1996. “I was doing something else and ended up with something with bubbles.”
    After whipping up a batch, he decided he wanted to add a little color. For whatever reason, the only food coloring the Fleer plant had in stock was pink. For that fact alone, pink became the iconic color of bubble gum.
    Fleer dubbed it Dubble Bubble and in the first year on the market it did $1.5 million in sales, surpassing the Tootsie Roll as the most popular one-cent candy. To this day, chewing gum has not lost its flavor: Americans spend some $2.5 billion on about a half-billion pounds of gum every year. And, in sweet vindication for Thomas Adams, many modern gums use synthetic