Essay On Chewing Gum

You might guess it’s a custom dreamed up by a modern-day, real-life Willy Wonka, but 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 as well as such medicinal purposes as relieving toothaches. The ancient Maya chewed a substance called chicle, derived from the sapodilla tree, as a way to quench thirst or fight hunger, according to “Chicle: The Chewing Gum of the Americas” by Jennifer P. Mathews. The Aztecs also used chicle and even had rules about its social acceptability. Only kids and single women were allowed to chew it in public, notes Mathews. Married women and widows could chew it privately to freshen their breath, while men could chew it in secret to clean their teeth.

In North America, the Indians chewed spruce tree resin, a practice that continued with the European settlers who followed. In the late 1840s, John Curtis developed the first commercial spruce tree gum by boiling resin then cutting it into

one of the wealthiest men in America. Wrigley started out as a soap salesman in his native Philadelphia. After moving to Chicago in 1891, he began offering store owners incentives to stock his products, such as free cans of baking powder with every order. When the baking powder proved a bigger hit than the soap, Wrigley sold that instead, and added in free packs of chewing gum as a promotion. In 1893, he launched two new gum brands, Juicy Fruit and Wrigley’s Spearmint. Because the chewing gum field had grown crowded with competitors, Wrigley decided he’d make his products stand out by spending heavily on advertising and direct-marketing. In 1915, the Wrigley Company kicked off a campaign in which it sent free samples of its gum to millions of Americans listed in phone books. Another promotion entailed sending sticks of gum to U.S. children on their second