People have been chewing gum in various forms since ancient times. There’s evidence that some northern Europeans were chewing birch bark tar 9,000 years ago, possibly for enjoyment or medicinal purposes. The American Indians chewed spruce tree resin. This practice was continued by the European settlers who followed. In 1848 John B. Curtis developed the first commercial spruce tree gum by boiling resin and cutting it into strips, which he would cover in cornstarch to prevent them from sticking to each other. By the early 1850s, Curtis had constructed the world’s first ever chewing gum factory in Portland, Maine. The first gum that he sold was called The State of Maine Pure Spruce Gum.
It turned out, though, that spruce resin wasn’t that great for producing gum because it didn’t taste that good and turned brittle after being chewed. For that reason, gum later started being produced out of other ingredients, such as paraffin wax. An inventor in New York, Thomas Adams, began developing chicle to create a substitute for rubber. When his experiments yielded no results, he finally realized that he could use chicle to produce a better type of chewing gum. He formed a company and by the late-1880s was making gum sold all across the country. Chicle was imported to the United States from Mexico and Central America. It served as the main ingredient in chewing gum until most manufacturers started replacing it with synthetic ingredients by the mid-1900s.
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