Gum Discovery
Discovery of Natural Gum
• No one is absolutely certain whom the first gum chewers were or how gum was invented.
• According to historians, civilizations around the world were chewing natural gum thousands of years ago.
The Ancient Greek and chewing gum
• In A.D. 50, Ancient Greeks chewed mastiche, tree resin from the Mastic tree. It may quite literally be said that mastiche is the "chew" of the Greeks, since the root "mastichan," in Greek means "to chew."
• Dioscorides, a Greek physician and medical botanist of the First Century, refers to the "curative powers" of the mastic in his writing.
• Today many Greeks and Middle Easterners enjoy chewing mastic resin, combined with beeswax, a softening agent.
The Mayans also chewed gum
• Researchers discovered that the Mayans, an Indian civilization that inhabited Central American during the second century, enjoyed chewing chicle - the coagulated sap of the Sapodilla tree.
• The Mayans were not too far behind the Greeks in developing the custom of chewing gum.
• Natural gum also comes from the latex of the Sapodilla tree and has become the main ingredient in chewing gum.
• In about the year 800, the Mayan civilization came to an end. The only Mayan practice retained intact was that of chewing gum and chocolate. The temples, the roads, the calendar, the great cities - all these were abandoned.
But chewing gum and chocolate remain an important part of their legacy.
Native Americans introduced gum
• The Native Americans discovered another natural form of gum-like resin by cutting the bark of spruce trees.
• They introduced the custom of chewing spruce gum to the early North American settlers.
• These savvy New Englanders created the first commercial chewing gum by selling and trading lumps of spruce.
• Spruce gum continued to be sold in 19th century America until the 1850s when paraffin wax became the new popular base for chewing gum.
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